He’s baaaaaack! An entire week after deactivating his Twitter and Instagram accounts, Kanye West reactivated the former. And his return to Twitter was pretty epic, which is to say kind of weird and confusing.
Saturday night — two days after his instantly infamous meeting with Donald J. Trump, and two weeks after his notorious, MAGA hat-heavy Saturday Night Live appearance — West posted four videos, three of them with the words “Mind control.”
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1051222297418375168
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1051253225163239424
The first two played like failed Instagram Stories someone forgot to delete. His premiere video began with him saying, “I know it’s night time, but…” and then fumbled around, ending after 15 seconds. The second was just 15 seconds of fumbling and inscrutable images.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1051253457657704454
Things picked up a bit with the third, which was an image of the logo that’s now his avatar: a picture of the globe that has stopped on Africa — you know, the continent his favorite sitting president once said was filled with “sh*thole countries.” West is there re-recording his next album, Yandhi.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1051253667687526400
The fourth video gifted the world with yet another 10-minute Kanye monologue, having treated one to the President of the United States a little over 48 hours before. The subject, as promised, was mind control, but West inevitably roamed free to other subjects.
“You know when people try to influence you through social media and try to tell you what to do or if you post something that’s positive on Instagram and it gets taken down if it’s not a part of a bigger agenda — that’s like mind control,” West says in the video.
“I feel like when people tell me what to do, I feel like they’re touching my brain,” he continued. “They’re trying to control our minds. They’re trying to control my mind and when someone tells me what to do and what I can wear and I can’t wear I feel like they are touching my brain.”
West then spoke about how he felt society had “programmed” him into thinking “clear.” And clarity is just how the man gets you, he thinks: “I’ve forgotten how to talk not clear because I’m so programmed to talk clear and sound proper. That gets in the way of how we feel.”
From there, West ranged all over the place. He touched on how people are bought by corporations. He name-dropped (and mispronounced) Ayn Rand. He compared himself to Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Tupac Shakur. He mentioned chatting with Twitter god Jack Dorsey. He talked about how he was “forced” to buy a house once he got rich.
He also lamented about not being able to say what he wanted on SNL (or saying it and getting booed by people who disagreed with him, rather). And he talked about how everyone thought Hillary was going to win but she didn’t, which proves that social media is bad. Or something.
Social media is all a lie, West said on social media. “It’s all part of a system to control your mind, to control my mind, to make me look like I’m crazy to you,” he stated. “I am not crazy.”
So welcome back? We can’t wait until he deactivates Twitter again.
