Parable of the Rapper's Daughter

The disturbing flippancy of North West's impersonations of Ye

Despair has many disguises and one of them is unapologetic obscenity. At the start of 2023, Kim Kardashian and her daughter North West, also the daughter of Ye (Kanye) West, released an 8 second TikTok video wherein North impersonates her father as his song “Bound 2” plays in the background, while Kim plays herself hanging and doting on the daughter-as-ex-husband, pursing her lips, leaning in for a kiss, wearing dramatic sunglasses designed by him. North wears makeup to mimic an adult male’s facial hair, hides her long wavy tresses beneath a black beanie, and for clothing, an androgynous, oversized, dingy black hoodie. She uses eyeshadow to etch creases in her forehead that matched her father’s, and her gaze arrives at that perfect pitch between vain and vulnerable that he always manages, peeking through a veil of contrived stoicism. North is nine. Yes, the children of the rich and famous are often precocious, but here that bends toward the precarious. 

In the decade old official music video for “Bound 2,” Kim and Ye are featured pseudo fucking in some of the most blasé eroticism you’ll ever witness. She’s a prop for his formulaic bravado, bouncing around listlessly on a motorcycle seat while he mounts her, and the whole scene seems to be moving through a quicksand of disgrace toward its willful scandalousness, the kind of display that doesn’t hide its yearning for hype. Spin it back and the seat she’s on turns into a carnival carousel and they’re circling around on a reanimated ceramic horse like anachronistic children trying to catch up with their adult personae. There’s a zombieish quality to the squealing song, the desperately pornographic video, and the remake in which Freud weeps gallantly while the 8 second castration is completed as fact or fantasy. 

—

There are several things that trigger me about Kim and North’s unfortunate duet, and most of them are rooted in my own upbringing. Being the first daughter of a widowed woman is a lot like the tragic whimsy acted out in their play. It’s triggering for its honesty. And with that, for its subtle declaration that the artist who made the song they’re playing is dead or somehow replaced by his heirs. The brutal seraphic light of open-hearted suffering disguised as play is my first clear mirror of myself at North’s age. I wore my costume maturity just as confidently and nervously, with just as much risk and rescue me in my eyes. I hid my uneasiness just as well, was unwavering, so that anyone who wanted to be spared my turmoil would never see it. And as much as I resisted the symbolism projected onto me, I also fulfilled it obsessively, unconsciously, by exerting the side of my personality that is protective and hyper-independant to both fill in for the missing father and dodge the mourning mother’s open displays of hysteria and loneliness by remaining aloof and clinical if she became effusive. 

I allowed myself to be idolized rather than mothered, and was tended to the way believers tend to their idols, because my mother had idolized (and feared and resented) my dad, and someone needed to uphold that kind of miracle so sharp it’s dangerous. It was up to me to carry the torch of inescapable grandeur in my heart and deeds. How could I commit to childhood except as an imposter or spy waiting out an awkward mission to get to the defining action. I love when delusion mistakes itself for lucidity like this, it is the marrow of botched heroism, a saving grace because heroes are very boring. I played along just short of being the kind of pawn Kim makes North in their bind. I always knew it was a little strange, being treated like an adult or equal partner in the household most of the time but not being able to tell this woman when she was wrong or crazy with impunity, at once guiding her and at her mercy. I avoided letting the dynamic be known, found it embarrassing, and I’ve always been grateful for my boundary there. I’ve always known when things are inappropriate and refused to glorify those things even if I had to placate them from time to time to survive. I was always ready to turn on them viciously and knew that time would come. I think if my mom had asked me to make a video of myself dressed as my father while she dangled off of me like a lover, I would have either ran away or called cps or simply refused and retreated to my room to read about the worlds I would enter when I grew up and escaped hers. 

It’s in part grotesque wealth and resources that allows some to dismiss Kim and North’s heinous patricide as if it’s casual or appropriate. It’s also the collective moral laxity and relativism of a society addicted to images. We don’t care how we get them, if they are strange and distracting enough we will covet them and grasp on and defend their depravity with our fiendish looking. We prefer this kind of looking that is looking away into a delirious spectacle not our own. We get to deflect and exploit the celebrities that exploit us for attention by watching them closer when they spiral and need impossible help. We will give these incidents so much attention that what follows needs to be doubly outrageous to arouse the same pleasure, disgust, or awe. We are sick with looking at one another over and over in these loops of passive obsession. The sickness is aggressive and endlessly regenerates itself in slick wannabe beauty that droops into horror on purpose, addicted to this ritual of taunting the innocent with what violates them. 

This new trauma economy gets by with permeating everything because we mistake its visual output for abstract or mundane. These images are woven into our daily lives like colloquialisms and make us their accomplices. So that we intentionally mistake this 8 second horror flick for a normal mother/daughter activity simply because it’s too spiritually expensive to let ourselves in on the fact that we are in the habit of baiting and exploiting children for entertainment and ‘content’ to such an extent that we fuel and reward their psychic upheaval when we should be trying to protect them. In a recent interview Kim mentioned that her and North drive around for hours listening to hip hop instrumentals while North raps over them. I wonder if she perceives a difference between taking after her father and becoming him, or between missing his presence and reenacting it. 

Can wealth and resources give your broken heart that kind of discernment or do they just provide more opportunities to indulge the fragmentation. Do broken-hearted mothers know that their daughters can see through their charade of public facing upbeat perfectionism into their most disturbing libidinal drives, and are busy empathizing with these women they hope they don’t become. I guess in that sense it is safer to become the father. One way or another, the girl’s life demands that she be harrowing. As the sample her father found declares bound to falling in love, she woos her mother with his image, a high pitched jugular. The dilemma is they’ve displayed depravity so deep, it’s inspired. North has overcome her father and made a video with her mom that is more charged than the one he made with her for the same song a decade ago, decay meets revival meets no— nope, somebody should have turned these terrible roles down, there should never have been such a reprise. What a dysfunctional achievement, but an achievement nonetheless, and one that must be noted for what it predisposes her to, and you to as spectators, whether passive or invested.

Hunter’s Interlude  

When you’re hunting you’re not allowed to just injure an animal and leave it to suffer. You have to shoot it in the heart, and shoot to kill. I think this is how love should be— severe, total, exacting. This could be the antidote to the trauma of failed romance. Find someone you can shoot in the heart with precision. Because the ones you leave for dead, half-struck, will inevitably regain their strength and come back to kill you, not out of vengeance, but out of the same love you failed to give them. To show you what love is, ethical love, they will shoot you in the heart. Nature’s intimacy is violent, it dotes on its chosen and covers them in the blood of whatever god they trust. The buck, the cheetah, the child of love all shooting to kill with tears in their eyes. Cameras can substitute for other lethal weapons wielded in love or lack thereof. 

—

The vengeance of Kim and North feels like amateur hunting, as if they’re trying to bait the game back to them, hoping the wind of spectacle catches their scent so that they can be pursued by everything they pretend to parody. It’s a sophisticated psychological tactic, feigning cutesiness for the cameras. It’s been rehearsed endlessly behind the scenes, take after talk after take. I shudder at the thought of the codependency I’d be experiencing today if I had obliged my mom that kind of companionship instead of retreating into my private world to observe her mourning from what felt like a safe emotional distance. My detached tolerance saved me from having evidence in the form of videos like Kim and North’s. I simply refused to bond with the parts of my mother I found problematic, and rewarded the ones I appreciated. I’m still like this. I am the severe hunter of my dreams, quietly backing away from anything that does not nourish completely. The children of widows are experts in assuaging other people’s heartbreak, so much so that I almost forgot I’d lost someone too. When I finally caught up to my own pain, it came in the form of an excess of affection for men a lot like my father, as if I could love them so much that love would override my need for them, and liberate me to something unconditional and whole. Such was my heart’s muscle memory, I’d been performing that equation toward my dead father my whole life. 

Kim and North’s parable for mourning, really a demonstration of attachment to an already broken social contract within the family, is meant to project their haunts onto their audience. And it works, it troubles anyone who is willing to admit what they see. They don’t want to be alone with their abandonment, and they aren’t, the whole world wants this one black man to renew his unspoken vow to be a martyr to popular culture and an identity he’s outgrown or outwitted with performative madness not unlike theirs.

Within the broken family it becomes a seething ultimatum. A couple days before the Bound escapade, Kim and North made a video pantomiming Sza’s “Kill Bill,” with Kim coming in on the part where she sings I might kill my ex, not the best idea. I see their current mafia of two on TikTok as a fast moving crime scene that, if we do the forensics, leads us back to the worst and neediest parts of ourselves and makes them almost endearing, picturesque. North is like a mix of Chaplin and Duane Jones in her ability to be herself and no one. The consolation: women and girls feeling indignant and discarded but knowing that their cries for help will only be heard if filtered through desirability or branded like sweet dark twisted commercials, will always be famous.