Every morning, I wake up in an air-conditioned room. I eat exotic fruits from far-flung regions whether they’re in season or not. As I drive myself to work cheaply and freely, I swipe through more or less the entire history of recorded music. I pay each and every of these modern luxuries at the tip of my finger precisely no mind. I take for granted the fact that I enjoy a standard of living previously reserved for royalty, a way of life rendered unexceptional by its dependability. I do not permit myself to contemplate its ending. I can, it pains me to admit, neither imagine a better nor a worse future.
This, I guess, is the result of a sophisticated and existential form of self-deception, a way of naturalizing a deeply unnatural state of being that is essentially my birthright. I hesitate to say that I never negotiate in my mind this ecstatic false consciousness with the tremendous level of violence, environmental degradation, and human misery that undergirds my unfettered access to mundane luxury. But it is difficult to square my self-understanding as someone with some awareness of his station as an imperial citizen with the fact that I am habit of routinely receiving packages of toilet paper and laundry detergent at my front door less than four hours after ordering them on my cell phone.
When I say that Kanye West’s New Orleans performance on August 28th was among the most profoundly challenging works of art I have ever encountered, what I mean is that the show was above all else a monument to the devilish bargain at the heart of Western consumption. If I went to the Superdome in search of an army of broccoli-haired Nazis, virtual pimps, right-wing provocateurs, and the once-great artist felled by some unknowable combination of mental illness, opportunistic hangers-on, and a lifelong provocative streak who brought them all out of their mothers’ basements, what I found instead was a room of about 65,000 consumers—those of us who consider in our favorite products only the costs that can be measured in United States Dollars. Put another way: West’s set, a sprinted marathon through the overwhelming majority of his career-defining songs, was transportive and spectacular enough to obviate the need for whatever justification each and every fan had concocted for their attendance. Everybody at the Superdome knew the moral ramifications of buying a ticket to see Kanye West perform, but like cheap gasoline, “Flashing Lights” is the sort of unsavory luxury that can only be pried out of cold, dead hands.
New Orleans, despite its reputation, offers surprisingly little by way of nationwide touring artists. This public imagination of the city as a mecca of live music is not itself incorrect, but its scene is largely comprised of local acts, street musicians, and small-cap venues.
