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I love Kanye West. I think you need brazen, arrogant fearless artists that think and say preposterous things in order to move the thinking of a society for the better or for the worse. He has a dozen songs that I simply love that are older but still on my playlists, and I love that he immerses himself in creativity.

Sure, he can be a colossal ass sometimes, but I still think he's an important part of our societal ecosystem. We need people like him in our pop culture just like we need Stephen Hawking, Maya Angelou, Muhammed Ali, etc.

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I fire up either Kanye West or Jay-Z whenever I have that feeling in the pit of my stomach before doing a difficult thing. Sometimes you just need a little bit of brazen, bombast to get started.

Added to my .zshrc:

  curl -s 'https://api.kanye.rest' | jq '.quote'

I think it’s less that our society needs him than that he is the unavoidable product of today’s society.

Hari Seldon would have foreseen him.

I think I agree but in a slightly different way. I see people like Kanye as the random noise added to a function to avoid getting stuck in a valley.

He just kind of vomits thoughts into the world and some of them get you thinking.

It makes me sad that so many people let his ego run rampant. If anyone is in need of ego death it is him

If you listen to Kanye's music, he is highly self-critical and introspective at many times. I think this is a type of fearlessness, specifically the ability to be so publicly vulnerable (though I don't know if that's what GP had in mind).

Kanye's public image is reflective more of the pressures of his industry and how our celebrity culture depicts famous artists. However I think it goes beyond that to broader social and economic factors. Consider how many conversations there are on HN about dealing with imposter syndrome; if you compare Kanye's media portrayal and his music, I think there are strong parallels many people here could identify with.

I suppose that works, except then you could say the same thing about the US president. They are friends too no?

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