Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why not? Kanye is not decadent because decadence involves drift, repetition, and stalemate, and Kanye’s public persona is defined by creativity, conversion, and reinvention. Now, that’s not to say that Kanye might not participate in decadence. One of the implicit or explicit arguments of my book is that even when you’re a rebel against decadence, it’s very hard to escape these fundamental forces in our society dragging us towards stalemates and repetition. So maybe all of Kanye’s reinventions and plans to reinvent the question mark come to nothing in the end. But the fact of his ambitions and the fact that he has actually invented a church, right? Kanye has a cult. He has Sunday services that are a unique phenomenon amongst celebrities. So even if there are limits on what he can achieve, he is a force for anti-decadence in a decadent society. So does the popularity of Kanye suggest we’re moving away from decadence? Or is that a kind of placebo we use to insulate ourselves from dynamism? “Oh, I like Kanye.” And then we go about being decadent.…

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