season's greetings.

words. 

"Both in spite of and because of everything above, West also pisses a lot of people off. He’s the avant-gardist and the Internet commenter rolled into one, visionary, vain, and perpetually aggrieved, a man who’ll complain that he should be even more famous than he is in one breath, then complain about everyone else’s celebrity-obsessed culture in the next. He comes off as an asshole, and not in the cool aloof way that Dylan came off as an asshole once upon a time, where you watch Don’t Look Back and think, yeah, but he would have been nice to me. I’m not sure there’s ever been a star of West’s magnitude so lacking in conventional “star power,” that magnetizing-yet-distancing distancing quality that cordons off its holders from the vulgarity of common judgment. West isn’t lacking in sanity, he’s lacking in social graces, and for all his hunger for adulation he’s oddly unconcerned with personal appeal. In an era in which the very idea of likability has been worn away by billions of unthinking mouse-clicks, he’s something like post-likable.

...West’s thin-skinned vanity, unseemly scorekeeping, and obsessive grievances may have been the defining aspects of his public persona in 2013, but they shouldn’t be so quickly discredited: At a time when we’re too often content with smarmy symbolism and well-learned politesse, Yeezus is raising hell. Nor should they drown out the music he made, courageous and difficult and hellraising in its own right, music that will outlast any of us, even the nucleus Himself. As West remarked in that Times interview all those months ago, “I am so credible and so influential and so relevant that I will change things.” In 2013, Kanye West was the genius we deserved, even when we didn’t. Maybe we can make it to Christmas."

SLATE: Anno Dominant: Yeezus’ miraculous year.