They Don't Understand the Things I Say on Twitter

What's really transgressive in 2025?

They don’t understand the things I say on Twitter. Nigga heil Hi-

I stop myself yet again.

Charles, you are at a farm shop! This is deeply unbecoming of a respectable member of the local community! You’re in Southwest England, not South Central LA!

I check my surroundings. I don’t think the nice lady behind the counter—the one who reserves my weekend papers for me and rushes to tell me when the butcher has delivered a fresh batch of homemade faggots—heard me.

Disaster averted.

It doesn’t help that Kanye West’s new song is really catchy. Like, really really catchy. I only had to hear it for the first time and it was stuck in my head like one of RFK Jr’s brainworms, burrowing through the pleasure centers and automatic behavior circuits of my gray matter, making me sing the chorus at the most inopportune moments like when I bumped into the postman or while I was waiting on hold to talk to an Indian about my mobile-phone bill.

Nigga heil Hitler!

My cool New York friends keep telling me the song is a cutting-edge piece of transgressive art, the kind of thing that’s been missing from pop music—or any form of popular culture—for so long. Kanye West is literally the only person who is pushing the envelope in 2025. Nobody else is doing what the great geniuses of modern art have always done—from Duchamp to David Bowie—which is to kick against the pricks and smash sacred idols and trample the two-faced pieties of bourgeois life. And that makes Kanye West a genius, they add.

The shock of the new, and all that.

Maybe. Maybe they’re right. And maybe it’s got something to do with the fact Kanye has what’s often referred to as “f*ck-you money,” generally estimated in the billions, and also because he has nothing to lose either. The man has already been disgraced, lost his wife, lost his kids, lost his trainer endorsements and his record deals—and now there’s nothing stopping him from saying what he really wants to say, like “Heil Hitler” and also how he’s a cuckold and addicted to nitrous oxide and he still can’t see his children.

To my more sceptical, provincial peasant’s eye, untutored—some might say uncorrupted—by the metropolitan’s taste for the endlessly novel and the frivolous, the whole thing looks much more like a desperate cry for help, an exasperated plea with a world that can’t understand Kanye West and can’t give him what he wants, which is, among other things, to see his children. (Pro tip for fathers involved in custody disputes: a public declaration of support for Adolf Hitler is unlikely to aid your cause.)

To my (simple) mind, the whole thing is of a piece with Mr West’s first presidential campaign. Recall the unseemly spectacle as the Chicago-born rapper, at his launch event, burst into tears on stage and told how his mother came close to aborting him before he was born. It’s a potent mix of self-aggrandisement and self-pitying that only the most pampered and privileged, who have become so totally unmoored from the reality of their situation, can display.

The “heil Hitler” bit is incidental. It’s a guarantee of attention at best, the verbal equivalent of defecating on the floor in a crowded room.

And sure, there is something transgressive in that. Taking a dump at a social event will never not be unwelcome and a violation of established norms. Shouting “heil Hitler” is probably the same.

Or is it?