https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=b1LjF9FnM5g
The first time I heard Kanye West on Jesus Walks in 2004, there was something about the way that he spoke about Jesus and the way that he approached things in a manner which he was using a kind of gangster language about hustlers and gangsters and all of this. But he was strangely flipping it in a manner to bring it almost into a strange gospel song. The first time I heard that, I started to pay attention to Kanye West and I have been paying attention to him from afar, from a certain distance since then. And so I was not completely surprised to see what is happening with him recently, though I am, can I say this, I am happy to see my attention pay off. And so I’m going to try to explain to you what’s going on to the extent that I can understand in terms of Kanye’s new album and in terms of this strange social moment that we’re in, how it all fits together and how when the world is upside down, we need to pay attention to the fools and now is the time to pay attention to someone like Kanye. This is Jonathan Peugeot, welcome to the symbolic world. So I just got back from Chicago, I was in Chicago for the weekend giving a talk at St. John Canch’s church, I’ll be putting those talks up as soon as they’re ready and there was something of a strange coming together of elements that I was going to Chicago during that time that on Sunday this traditional church was celebrating a feast called Christ the King and that Kanye West had just put up his album called Jesus is King, all of this and that Kanye is from Chicago and talked about Chicago all the time, all of these elements were kind of coming together and so in my talk I discussed Kanye and the relationship to sacred art. You’ll have to watch that talk to get the full relationship to sacred art but I thought it would be important to go into what is going on because it’s happening now, this is the moment that this album came out and that Kanye is making waves in the culture. So why do I say that we need to watch the fools? I’ve made several videos about this that we’re living in a world that is upside down, where the exception has become the rule, where the margins have become king, the aesthetics of the carnival are all around us, this spinning, this turning, the entertainment mode, everything about our world is carnival-esque and usually it is the fool which brings us to that moment, it is the fool, the clown, all of these types of characters that bring us into this upside down world of spinning and entertainment and of excess. But my contention for the past few years has been if the fool is the one who turns things upside down, then the fool is also the one who turns things right side up and that is why for the past 10 years, for the past decade, I have been watching for these fools to appear on the horizon and we saw some of them in the last few years, people like Milo Yiannopoulos, people like Gavin McGuinness, who had all the imagery of the fool, people who were somewhat in, who had come into a kind of excessive culture, you know, Gavin was the founder of Vice and all of a sudden he becomes a Christian and starts to become more conservative, there are several characters like that, like I said, Milo was also one of those characters, but Kanye was one that I had been watching for a very long time. When I heard for the first time the song Jesus Walks in 2004, I was really surprised at the way that he was able to use the aesthetic of gangster rap with a certain talk about violence and gang related violence and hustlers and all this, but then somehow flip it in a manner which is to say that Christ is always with the lowest, is always walking with the lowest and there was something about the way he did that that made me want to pay attention. So I have been watching him from afar for a very long time. When I saw that he married this, when I saw that he, at some point I saw that he was like dating a stripper and then he married Kim Kardashian and I was reminded of stories in moments of inversion where the prophets are asked to marry a whore, there’s the story of King David who is very much that holy fool, you know, he’s an entertainer, King David was an entertainer, he was the youngest of his peers, he was the smallest one, he also, he had a gang of thieves and ruffians with him, he pretended to be crazy, he did all these things, he also married other people’s wives and so King David is a figure to understand the holy fool, he’s really a figure to watch and I would say pay attention because my brother Mathieu is currently, it seems, writing a book about King David to help us understand this moment in our culture, but so I, Mathieu and I have also with me have been watching my brother Mathieu to understand is he possibly this fool that’s going to flip, that’s going to go in a way to the bottom and is going to become this extremely inverted character but then is going to flip back up and so there was a point where I was even, I couldn’t pay attention to Kanye too much because his last albums were so, were so crass and so vulgar and so blaspheming, you know, blaspheming, calling himself God and saying that he’s Jesus basically and so he really went to the end, he went right to the edge where he married a woman that is exactly the image of this whore who became famous for making a sex tape and who was famous for being famous, represents all this excess, all this sensuousness and so then when last year when Kanye kind of went crazy and then went into the asylum, my focus started to pay attention to him even more, the fact that he saw supporting Trump as a form of ultimate rebellion, all of that, just everything about that seems that it was something to pay attention to and so finally these Sunday services really does mark a transition and I think it’s a transition, it’s not the only transition we’ve seen in the past few years but it’s one which I think is important because it does represent that flip from someone who went all the way to the bottom of pop culture and now is flipping. There is a, one of the things I’ve been telling you guys about is about the problem of entertainment and the problem of reducing culture to entertainment and what that does to people. Ancient culture, what we call culture, ancient culture was participative, stories were participative, they were your stories, people would come and tell stories around fires, they would have a poetic meter in which to tell ballads and stories and romances of the famous characters in your story, the same for the stories in the gospel, it was the same for music and dancing, they had folk dancing and music and music and dancing were actually participative. There are some little remainders of that in things like square dancing where the dancing is not just you dancing just to show off or to be in your own little world or to seduce somebody but rather to participate in bringing people together and manifesting the unity that exists among people. Dancing can play that role, it doesn’t play that role so much anymore but what I wanted to get people to understand is that when we see things like cosplay and we see things like fan fiction and crazy Star Wars fans who dress up as characters who are trying to live in those worlds, what we’re seeing is that hunger for participation. We see the same with Harry Potter and of course with Marvel comics, all of this that people have this desire to participate in a story but you can’t, you can’t participate fully in that story, it isn’t your story and someone pointed out to me recently that not only is it not your story but that story is actually owned by people, it is a trademark, these stories are trademarks which are owned by people and so your desire to participate in that story becomes very shady because it is what is it end of being, buying merch, buying the products, consuming the products. Now ancient stories like religious stories were those that you ended up plunging into and being part of and so what we’re seeing is in Kanye’s new album, what we’re seeing is him realizing that music without purpose ends up being, ends leads you to nothing and there’s a quote in one of the songs, I’m probably going to paraphrase it because I don’t have it in front of me, where he says let the demons know this is a mission not a show and I think that that’s the flip, I think that that’s the flip that’s happening which is that people are coming to the end of entertainment culture as entertainment culture is becoming overwhelming, I mean we have more movies, more tv shows, more video games, we’re just drowning in entertainment but that drowning in entertainment also marks a tipping point where all of a sudden we are saturated, we know people are, people are drunk on entertainment and so as you reach the end of that, as you reach the bottom, the only way to go is to move towards purpose and to move towards arts, culture that brings together, that has the purpose of making you participate in the story. So when you look at Kanye’s Sunday services you can see that that’s what’s happening instead of having a performer and an audience he’s setting things up in a circle where all the singers are in a circle together and they’re looking at each other and they’re singing in a manner which is it is communicative, which is trying to create unity amongst the people that are doing it and so although it’s still a show and it’s very awkward and a lot of the things that Kanye says in his album are extremely awkward, you know, it’s a mix of praising but then there’s always these weird moments of boasting and these weird moments, there’s a place in one of the songs where he complains about the IRS and he said that’s why he charges so much for his products because if he didn’t then his family would starve, it’s like okay Kanye we don’t feel sorry for you but I think it’s important to see it from as a broader phenomena even though I don’t think that you could see Kanye as some kind of a leader, someone that you need to pay attention to in terms of the quality of his message you could say. You mostly have to see what’s going on and see what he’s doing and what he’s manifesting as a marker in a social pattern. As we see the social pattern manifest itself, as we see this culture moving completely towards bread and circus and then realizing that man cannot live by bread and circus alone, that’s the shift that we’re seeing and we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the fool who brings about that flip and some of the the things that have been happening have been crazy. I mean to watch Kim Kardashian baptize herself and baptize her children in the Armenian Orthodox faith, you know, and to watch Kanye West who has had devolved into this extremely crass person all of a sudden have this desire to create worship music, that is a social marker because when things start to fall, for a change to happen it has to happen at the bottom and that is very difficult for people to understand. The spark comes from the top of the hierarchy but the change happens at the bottom and so when you watch for example the rise of Christianity in Rome you can understand that the first to convert to Christianity, when there’s an actual revolution, when there’s a change in the structure of things, when there’s a renewal for good or for bad, that is when there’s something changes paradigms, the spark starts at the top but the shift happens at the bottom and that’s why Christians were the poorest of the poor, were slaves, were women, were all the lower parts of society and they’re the ones who brought about that shift and then all of that connected together in terms of heaven and earth. You can see it, you can see it for example like the fact that very strong moments in culture like Dante who wrote his poem in a secular, in a common Italian language rather than writing it in Latin because he was at that point of transition. He is one of the characters that marks the transition from the middle ages into this new age and there are many examples of that and so that’s also one of the reasons why you always have to watch the when things are getting shady, when things are getting crazy, you have to look down, you have to look at the bottom and see what spark in the darkness is going to start to shine and I think that that’s one of the things we’re seeing now and we’re seeing this flip happen. It’s something that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time that I’ve hinted at, that I’ve told you about and so I think we need to continue to pay attention and I would say be careful in the sense that Kanye West is a trickster, Kanye West is a fool character and you know he can bring about, he can manifest this shift but he is a shifty character. Don’t put your trust on him because he can go either way at any point. He can completely change and go in another direction and that wouldn’t be surprising either but rather we do need to see that the desire for participation is real in our culture and worship, celebration, realizing that that is actually what culture is pointing to, the desire to celebrate things. Now you can celebrate dark things, you can celebrate one of the things that for example since the advent of rock and roll has basically been a celebration of sexuality but you sometimes darker things than that as well but that is really what music ends up being. Now the question is what are you celebrating and once you understand that you can have something like music which is a celebration but then becomes a participatory thing and becomes a participatory thing which is celebrating the highest, that’s when you realize that the ultimate purpose of music and of culture is worship. It just depends what you’re worshiping but if you can align that worship towards the highest thing then you have the possibility of creating a new stability for the mass, a new ground to stand on you would say and so I think keep paying attention to what’s going on. I’m telling you guys for sure with this happening, this whole Kanye West thing, 2020 put on your seatbelt guys because 2020 is going to be a crazy year and who knows what direction it’s going to go but pay attention because things are about to speed up. If you enjoy the Symbolic World content there’s a lot of things you can do to help us out. If you’re not subscribed please do go ahead and share this to all your friends if you can get involved in the discussion. We have a Facebook group in which people can talk about these subjects. 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