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NOTHING RHYMES WITH ORANGE, THEN, EVERYTHING RHYMES WITH ORANGE.

@kanyewest ”emphasis” and “sensitive” don’t rhyme. #ThatsCheatinKanye

So says @TheSuperKu and I think a lot of people would agree with him. In his outrage, Ku is simultaneously right and wrong. “Emphasis” and “sensitive” don’t rhyme, yet in Kanye, we hear unrhyming words rhyme perfectly well. To Ku though, Kanye’s feigned inability to pronounce words – pass that Versace (Ver-say-see) – is perceived as cheating, somehow dishonest. 

Though perhaps Ku isn’t so stupid, and perceives in this lack of rhyme Walter Benjamin’s ungereimt (unrhymed),which carries a second meaning of incoherency, as in the English expression “without rhyme or reason” (Weigel). And it is this unrhymedness that leaves Ku feeling the irrevocable falling away of meaning and sense from the material, sonorous body of language. Or cheated.

In this way Kanye challenges our understanding of the way that we perceive language. Much like the Internet has. Words have been altered and accepted and now form part of a new vocabulary. Teh can be understood as the, ur as your and deli undoubtedly daily. These modifications could be seen as ornament or excess. In her book Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Elizabeth Grosz refers to the theories of George Bataille, who asserts that organisms ordinarily receive more energy than is necessary for maintaining life and that this excess “must be spent willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” 

Let’s face it, Kanye likes to spend. You could argue that his willingness to spend comes from a place of deep discontent. But his willingness to spend spills over into a language of excess. Although there is a certain sadness connected to his economy, there is also a sense of invention. Never feeling satisfied leaves one with a constant compulsion to change and grow. I suppose Kanye would call it his drive. Kanye writes for all of us who have ever felt hemmed in, even betrayed by language. Have you ever just not used a word for fear of mispronunciation and ridicule? Kanye hasn’t. Pre-requisite is not an easy word to make rhyme with anything and is syllabically tricky. But prerequits, according to Kanye, can rhyme with seconds, and many people find that challenging. We understand a non-word like prerequits despite its transformation because language is not fixed, it is ever-changing and unstable. This mercuriality enables dramatic expansion to take place in the heterogeneity of language. Our recognition of prerequits as having the same meaning as pre-requisite, makes Kanye’s determined inventiveness a success.

But for the @TheSuperKu, the success of Kanye’s unrhyming undermines and transgresses a certain logic of functionality. Even if the very platform Ku uses to critique Kanye has its foundation in excess and reworking. Furthermore, Ku’s use of the hashtag #ThatsCheatinKanye – capitalized for the reading pleasure of his followers – is another kind of Kanyeism. Kanye might as well have invented the hashtag through his sense of emphasis and mispronunciation. By deforming career (carurrr), year (yurrrr) and secure (securrrr), he creates an internal logic of referentiality between the three terms, which are otherwise unrelated. We are able to search through Kanye’s songs, and catalogue new glorious sequences. Each year of his career he grows more secure in the emphasis of his sensitivity. And by sensitivity, I mean his sense of the feel of words and language, sensing what can relate to what, the malleability of each unit in the economy of excess.