Vogue magazine called the 2010s the decade when hip-hop’s wardrobe became more openly receptive to femininity. The thorny process of queering and reconceptualizing the unstable heteronormative image of Black hypermasculinity in African American popular culture neither begins nor ends with pioneering rapper Young Thug — yet he could have become its most important representative, if not for his own reluctance and conservative impulses holding him back.

I listen as I am told. I listen as I say. DONT TAP THE GLASS. To answer to Tyler (and all other authors) with his own title so that they do not forget our privacy and the freedom to perceive and experience as we wish. DONT TAP THE GLASS will forever be a record of a time Tyler, The Creator wanted to move and invited us to join him. Whether we join in the dance while listening loudly or take away our own values and meanings from the work will be our free decision, beyond all manifestos and instructions.

It is highly likely that many will attempt to interpret the rollercoaster life of the artist formerly known as Kanye Omari West (now Ye). His life’s trajectory may have already been foreshadowed by Orson Welles in his film Citizen Kane (1941). And thirteen years earlier, Sigmund Freud contributed to this task by analyzing the personality of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

In the essay Sunmundi & Sasco – Contacting [a late-stage internet memento], we analyze the album Contacting, its dystopian bleak vision woven with postmodern digital skepticism and tears shed over a commodified society. [contacting à communication à community]: finding strength and love through human connection. “A disservice to death’s orbit and a wine-spilling smile aimed at the bright now.”

Kanye West at a Slovak music Festival: Can Rap Be Separated from Politics?
Ye as the headliner is not a victory for culture; on the contrary, it denies the very essence of the genre and is a result of its misunderstanding rooted in privilege. True heroism and the defense of free speech should be seen as resisting empires, opposing wars, defending human rights, and promoting social change—these are the radical tendencies we should celebrate in rap.