“What was Kanye West thinking?” has remained a prevailing question since the Grammy award-winning rapper-producer pulled the rip cord on his spectacular descent into rightwing nihilism more than a decade ago. In Whose Name?, a cinéma vérité take on the tortured musical genius (who goes by just Ye now), offers fans and long-term observers a new artifact to pore over in search of answers – and reason to be disappointed all over again.
That’s not a knock on the 104-minute opus, an outcropping of more than 3,000 hours of footage – some of it never before seen, some of it a reverse perspective on the viral stunts and rants that have marked Ye’s dramatic nosedive. Director Nico Ballesteros – who started filming in 2018, at age 18, with nothing to recommend him (his stint as a second assistant director on a Jesus Is King concert video came later) – had sweeping access to Ye and made the distinctive choice not to layer it with any talking-head commentary for context. Mostly, he turns on the camera, holds a tight focus on his subject and lets the rest drift in and out of frame.
The laissez-faire approach, which benefits from having an artistic savant on the opposite end of the lens, would seem to owe less to Ballesteros’s relative inexperience than to the fact that Ye simply cannot suffer anything that might push back on his self-assured worldview; that’s even as Ye confirms, on camera and without hint of irony, what many have suspected for years: that he’s gone off his meds. (In fact, he regards the documentary as a kind of mental-wellness exercise that could someday be a salve to the masses or, failing that, play at his funeral.) In one ridealong scene with Ballesteros, Ye confesses to having bipolar disorder while in cat-face makeup for the Fade music video – a bewildering moment of self-awareness.
Where another self-important person can’t take no for answer, Ye literally cannot hear the word without having an explosive tantrum or perceiving even the slightest differences of opinion as part of some sinister effort to control his mind. “I would rather be dead than on medication,” he rages at Kris Jenner. In the doc, we see him use his mental health as a weapon to disentangle himself from a billion-dollar business portfolio that he nonetheless views as exploitative of him.
This visceral need to always be right goes a long way to explaining why the many public figures in Ye’s orbit were initially hesitant to push back against his antisemitic and white-supremacist rants. Swizz Beatz is the exceptional peer who actually confronts Ye about his controversial embrace of the Maga movement and the damage it threatens to the very communities who supported his rise to the top of the charts. (On the other hand, there’s Chris Rock likening Ye’s decision to wear a Maga hat on SNL to Sinéad O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope. ) Ballesteros was a fly on the wall for Ye’s 2018 SNL performance, which entailed Ye going off on a curtain-dropping rant about the show using Black talent to ridicule Black luminaries; the broadside was especially personal for head writer Michael Che – whom, the doc shows, sat down with Ye before the show to establish some punchline boundaries, only for the rapper to launch into a rant about slavery. “You’re a hero to us, but what you did was fucked up,” Che says before SNL producer Lindsay Shookus shuts Ballesteros down. (“This isn’t good for us,” she says.)
Slavery is a stubborn theme of Ye’s rants. He sees it at the core of every corporate relationship, no matter how well the slave in question might be compensated. He tells Kim Kardashian that the E Network, the former home of her long-running reality TV show, is her “slave ship”. (It’s one of several alarming scenes between the formerly married couple that lay the groundwork for their eventual divorce.) Ye is so persistent about labeling everyone he encounters as some stripe of capitalist puppet that he can scarcely appreciate the extent to which the far right has made him into their personal mascot. “Culture will always be upstream from politics,” Candace Owens tells Ye during a visit to his Calabasas headquarters with Charlie Kirk. “Whoever can control culture can control politics.”
The longer Ballesteros’s doc went on, the more I found myself harkening to the way it began: with Ye on tour with Lady Gaga as part of the rollout for Graduation, just before his Taylor Swift moment at the MTV Video Music Awards set the stage for his villain arc. It was a refreshing reminder of who Ye once was: a totally unlikely pop star whose transcendent music spoke to a generation of poor and middle-class strivers. And while In Whose Name?, the most compelling of the Ye career autopsies by far, offers a more complete picture of where and how it all went so wrong, it doesn’t leave you feeling any less frustrated with the few new answers it manages to get.
In Whose Name? is out in US cinemas on 19 September and elsewhere at a later date
