Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has sought controversy for much of his career, beginning in earnest when he interrupted a then-19-year-old Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards. In recent years, his time in the public eye has extended beyond celebrity feuds to include a presidential run, blatant antisemitism, drug abuse, and misconduct accusations. Few people are more controversial.
In Whose Name?, a recent documentary directed by Nico Ballesteros, looks closely at Ye during the high-profile turbulence of those years, and purports to follow how someone once so highly regarded—at least in the categories of art and fame—came to his current state. Ballesteros, who as a teenager joined Ye’s entourage after the latter’s 2016 hospitalization for mental distress, reportedly filmed more than 3,000 hours, but the final product is pared down to just shy of two hours, without commentary or cutaway interviews. According to producer Simran Singh, “This film presents a raw and often unsettling portrait, without commentary or conclusion, leaving viewers to interpret the events for themselves. Nico was living alongside Ye, camera in hand, not fully knowing what he was capturing or where it would lead and that’s exactly what makes the footage so powerful.”
One might argue that omitting comment on Ye’s behavior allows the viewer to make a freer judgment on the subject, without pressure from the biases of interviewees or the documentarian. But whittling down 3,000 hours of footage to just under two necessarily involves editorial choices that either highlight or omit particular events and details, creating a narrative. In Whose Name? never explores the relationship between Ye and Ballesteros, but at one point, after Ye is confronted by comedian Michael Che after the former wore a MAGA hat in a Saturday Night Live appearance, Ye asks Ballesteros for his opinion. Ballesteros responds with sympathy to Ye. And while many of Ye’s controversies feature in the documentary, from his disastrous 2018 SNL appearance to the bizarre Chicago concert that featured Marilyn Manson months after he was accused of assault, others are noticeably absent. While Candace Owens makes several appearances, far-right influencer Nick Fuentes does not, despite his association with the rapper. Nor do Ye’s antisemitism, the beheading of an effigy of Pete Davison, or recent songs that glorify Hitler. While the documentary gives a close look at Ye’s mental decline, it curiously avoids attending to some of his most public (and most alarming) antics. Such omissions might indicate partiality in Ballesteros’s direction: Perhaps to Ballesteros, antisemitism and violence do not cohere to the narrative he has attempted to weave of Ye’s life. Or maybe their absences suggest that the filmmaker thinks examining Ye’s side of these controversies would not yield much of interest to the viewer.
This latter assumption seems dubious, given that Ye’s reputation as a provocateur has long preceded him and that his mental instability has been a recent recurring subject in pop culture headlines. If In Whose Name? draws a crowd (my screening did not), it is because it purports to present an intimate portrait of someone, once acclaimed as a musical genius, who now unrepentantly espouses antisemitism and conspiracy theories. A person with such a dramatic descent seems like the perfect documentary subject. But while In Whose Name? gives a close look at the turbulence of the past five years of Ye’s life, it never quite offers a glimpse of real interiority of its subject, maybe because to do so would be seen at best as shrugging shoulders at Holocaust denial and misogyny.
But it’s a shame that a documentary made by someone who had such enormous access to his subject could not give a greater glimpse of that subject’s interiority. The documentary, then, seems like a missed opportunity to delve into what happened to Ye and how he fell from vulnerability to hatred.
I first listened to Ye in college. I had grown up in a relatively sheltered environment, listening exclusively to contemporary Christian music and country legends from decades prior. When I went to college, I found myself grossly unfamiliar with the musical touchpoints that had apparently defined the sound of my generation. I started listening to pop music and eventually rap. And it was rap music—and particularly Ye—that most intrigued me. I had little familiarity with his frequent lyrical subjects: the city of Chicago, new wealth and subsequent lifestyle changes, toxic relationships, trying to prove oneself to others. Some of Ye’s lyrics, like those in “All of the Lights,” “Strange Fruit,” “Runaway,” and “No More Parties in LA” read like candid confessionals of his various shortcomings. I had difficulty imagining myself in the situations described in the songs, with my limited life experience (and that what I had was so different from the rapper’s). But the seeming vulnerability of these songs made me feel as if I could understand them anyway. In encountering art that described a life so different from my own, I found that I opened myself up not just to new music, but also to new experiences, albeit secondhand.
It doesn’t take long looking at music charts and bestseller lists and box office data to see that relatability sells. But while relatability might be an important trait to seek out in relationships, there’s something philistine about using it as a metric for determining whether a piece of art is good or not: “Relatability” places the audience at the center of not only the analysis of art, but also of the world because their lifestyles, beliefs, and experiences are never challenged. The world shrinks around one person’s orbit. But engaging with art has—or should have—a humbling, educational purpose as well. Becoming familiar with the unfamiliar, whether beautiful or ugly, deepens human experience. Listening to pop and rap anthems in college, I came to a secondhand understanding of the troubles of wealth, fame, and toxicity without experiencing them myself. What made Ye a powerful artist—to the point that his music not only endures his dramatic reputational fallout but continues to enjoy wide popularity (at the time of writing this, his Spotify page boasts 64 million monthly listeners)—was his willingness to not only show the public his troubles but invite them inside his mindset through his music.
Had In Whose Name? done the same, it might have provoked some thoughtful discussion about relatability and celebrities, about whether one can separate art from the artist, about the particularly horrifying sins of Ye and their place in our culture, and about mental health. To do so would not be to tacitly approve its subject, but rather create an opportunity to question the public’s role in promoting provocative behavior from celebrities, to grapple with how our culture thinks of mental health, and to shed light on the normalization of extreme beliefs and rhetoric. As it is, I left the theater with just a headache, not having learned much new.