There is, perhaps, no time more fondly remembered for me than that of America in the 1920s, when wealth was there for the taking, jazz was the sound of the times, and Prohibition was making millions for the men we now call bootleggers.
It was utterly and entirely a time all its own, and I speak without sarcasm. I sincerely wish that I could have been there.
At the height of the era, a man named F. Scott Fitzgerald delivered a novel that painted a picture of life in the Jazz Age, replete with the relaxed splendor of the rich and the hard-learned lessons of the upwardly mobile, a bildungsroman of sorts for the America of the age. It was more, though, than just a portrait or a snapshot of the times; it was a book that, like its readers, hesitated to tip its hand, and delayed indefinitely its judgment of its characters in favor of reserving the right to simultaneously condemn and to admire them.
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life,” the narrator says, and so, it seems, the author was as well. Fitzgerald does not, at any point, hand down his verdict on the wealthy. He elects instead to do battle with himself—wanting while wanting not to want. A man who seemed to be constantly in conflict with himself, he longed for something he thought he shouldn’t have, like an addict.
There was a reason that Fitzgerald always wrote about the rich, and there was a reason that what he wrote always sold—not the novels, at the time at least, but certainly the stories. Americans wanted to read, and Fitzgerald wanted to write, all about the wealthy. They wanted both to condemn and to admire, to be disgusted and to be entertained, to be both enchanted and repelled by what the author rightly dubbed “the inexhaustible variety of life.” And it worked—Fitzgerald made money off his stories, and America subsisted on the consumption of his in-between dreams of the ruling social elites.
So what’s changed since then? Well, the short answer is everything, not least of all our relations with those ruling elites. Elements of American history as disparate and divorced from one another as the G.I. Bill and reality television brought down the divide between the wealthy and the rest of our world and brought their lifestyles and lives into our collective mind in a way that demystified them and made them more accessible. Their lives are no longer the stuff of legends, but of late night television and cheap periodicals.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same—if the title of the song “Mo Money, Mo Problems” isn’t a contemporary paraphrasing of Gatsby, then I’m not sure what is. Sure, it’s missing the codified language and lyrical dexterity of “The Great Gatsby,” but what use are they in a world that’s now narrated by those aforementioned upwardly mobile? Those are decadences of a distant past, when the wealth was not accessible and language was a signifier, and the lifestyle of the elite could only be recounted to us by someone who’d always been a part of it.
So what, then, is Kanye West? Well, in many ways he’s the celebrity we’ve always loved to watch, one who agrees with Fitzgerald that, when it comes to the wealthy, he can’t make up his mind. Surely, he makes up part of a larger trend in hip-hop music where wealth is still, as it has always been, something to be shown off, and Prohibition is still making millionaires, albeit with weed rather than whiskey. But West also brings more to the table.
Kanye West, unlike others, uses his rags to riches story as a source of introspection and personal meditation, just like Fitzgerald did. West is confused by his wealth and is unsure, publicly as well as within himself, what exactly to make of it. It has been his dream, as it has been ours, for his waking life. Now that the wealth is here, it’s hard to cope with the fact that it brings its own problems. It’s hard for him to believe that he might not want parts of that which he has always wanted, and he resists coming down on one side or the other, perhaps for his own good.
In that, though, he is in good company. Fitzgerald never figured out how he felt about wealth and the variety of life, and so we’ve been trying to do it for him for close to a century. You might even say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that “The Great Gatsby” paved the way for “The College Dropout,” and that so long as West remains deadlocked, he will enjoy longevity as we try to figure it all out for him.
Chris Bassil is a Trinity junior. His column runs every Friday.
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