Feminists and Kanye West

I have an almost compulsive habit of mentally flipping the genders in pop songs. When listening to a dude-centric song, I imagine how I'd tackle the song if I were a singer covering it, and I'm almost convinced Kayne West's "Runaway" passes the Willis test . (Well, maybe if you took out the part about dick shots.) Here's Willis herself explaining her method in her essay, "But Now I'm Gonna Move":

"A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test, a diatribe like "Under My Thumb" is not nearly as sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens's gentle, sympathetic "Wild World;" Jagger's fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female -- in fact, it has its female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra's "Boots" -- but it's hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he's too innocent for the big bad world out there."

Granted, "Runaway" is far from perfect, and switching up the gender practically changes the entire tenor of the song, but I can easily envision it being sung from the point-of-view of the woman being wronged, knowing her man is no good and daring him to "run away."

While his video for "Monster" came under fire from feminists to the point that some of them threatened to have it banned , I know quite a few feminist-identified women who are Kanye West fans; and I'll agree, even at his worst, his songs usually have some hope for redemption, even if that redemption comes at a cost.

Think Progresses Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a great post  last year that better elucidates Kanye's willingness to admit -- even embrace -- his own failures. Of "Mama's Boyfriend," a song he's played live, but that didn't make it onto his last album, she says:

" I think it’s fairly obvious that Kanye, if not an actual misogynist, has some fairly profound unresolved issues around women. But it’s interesting, and kind of a relief, that in this song he reserves his anger for the men who dated his mother, rather than directing it at her or at the women he dates who are raising sons as single mothers. Obviously, Kanye’s trying to do a better job by his surrogate son than his surrogate fathers did by him, explaining “I don’t read palms / And I don’t read psalms / But I did take lil’ man to church / Took lil’ man to school.” But I don’t really read in this the expectation that he’ll actually be able to break the cycle by raising the kid up a bit. Families are going to continue to be fractured, and kids are going to keep hating the cheesy-looking people who enter and exit their lives on the grounds that they’re not flesh and blood replacements."

This doesn't let him off the hook, per se, and I still think looking at pop culture through a feminist lens is vital, but his willingness to appear flawed, coupled with an almost hyper-self awareness, gives him a vulnerability not usually seen in pop music.