When I was a homesick, young college student, miles and miles away from Chicago, it was the music video of an up-and-coming young rapper named Kanye West that made me feel closer to home.
I remember staring longingly, in Florida, at a TV screen airing “Through the Wire.” The video took viewers to all of my favorite high school hangs: the Halsted Mall; my personal favorite Harold’s Chicken location at the time on 103rd; places that now made my South Side world feel magnified on a world stage.
And then there was the song itself. Nothing is more Chicago than a story about pushing through a car accident to literally rap through a mouth wired shut. I was hooked.
But more than that, I was enamored with the creativity, lightness and fun of the entire “College Dropout” album. I was loving college life, and here I was, diving into an album about also dropping out of it.
The irony of it all: It was clear that Kanye, the son of a beloved Chicago college professor, was more than capable of going to college if he so wanted. In it, there was a defiance — a creative distinctiveness I learned was also one of the reasons I probably loved my favorite Jay-Z album, “The Blueprint.”
With albums like “808s & Heartbreak” to “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” I’d spend hours dissecting every lyric, every sample, every artistic choice. A mad genius who pushed the envelope with his work is always more fun to study than someone who plays it safe.
And at the time, Kanye’s bravado and confidence was a comfort in a world that had pushed respectability on Black millennials like me. After Hurricane Katrina landed, I watched thousands of people who looked like me left helpless: in flooded waters, stuck on rooftops, hungry and in need of food. Next to that imagery came photographs of our nation’s commander-in-chief, looking down at a flooded New Orleans from the comfort of Air Force One.
So, when Kanye said on live TV, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” he said what many Black folks were thinking: The federal government had stranded a city of its own filled with Black people.
But years later, his outspokenness changed from being the voice of others to a cloudy, indistinguishable mess — and with it came my own disappointment. He called slavery “a choice,” handed out White Lives Matter shirts at his Yeezy label’s fashion week shows in Paris, went on antisemitic tirades and even sold a shirt with a swastika.
I don’t believe in trying too hard to make sense of words and actions that are simply harmful, nor do I tell people how to think or feel about celebrities. But somewhere between the fame and the connections, or — as many fans argue — the mental illness and the death of his mother, Kanye has become unrecognizable from the creative we fell in love with.
But here’s the complication many fans are now in: Whoever he is today, and regardless of who he may continue to become, music — and Chicago music, specifically — has been forever changed by his presence.
He mentored Chance the Rapper. He spotlighted people like GLC and Consequence. He collaborated (both in music and in community work) with Rhymefest. He put prodigious fashion designer Virgil Abloh on center stage in more ways than one. So many people and institutions were touched by Kanye, his talent, or his fame throughout the decades.
I don’t listen to Kanye’s new music. While I don’t think any artist can be perfect, I’m a person who is either inspired by or turned off by what they do outside of the recording booth. And his creative choices today are weighty, dark and lack the delight that made me fall in love with his music in the first place.
But when I’m somewhere, and “Through the Wire” comes on, a smile so big it takes over my entire face appears, and it is uncontrollable. And the warm memories of the “Old Kanye” many of us remember are still there. As he returns to Chicago and his old stomping ground, during what seems to be a literal apology tour, we’ll see if — for many fans — those feelings only exist in a collective consciousness.
Arionne Nettles is a news editor for WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is the author of “We Are the Culture: Black Chicago’s Influence on Everything” and “Journalism for Dummies.” Follow her on Instagram.