"I am A God" - Kanye West

“I am a god / … / Hurry up with my damn croissants.”

This may be the best rhyme ever, so far at least, because a) it doesn’t quite rhyme but it’s so close , b) it’s apparently unique, and c) because it was Kanye who rhymed it, so it's hard to figure out what it signifies.

I have always been a sucker for a clever rhyme, especially one new to me. Smokey Robinson secured his place in Pop Heaven with a song thatcontained a couplet that paired public and subject (it also liberally employed internal rhyming, for which I also have a weakness). Sting had what I thought was a pretty good one with apprentice and Charybdis.

Rap is rife with clever rhymers. But rap has never really spoken to me, and furthermore, ever since the genre degenerated into clichés about Benjamins, Tec-9s and bent-over hos – right about the time that more people began to identify Ice Cube as an actor than as a member of N.W.A. – I have had even less reason to listen. Too much rap I’ve heard in the last 10 or 15 years has become worse than offensive; it has become boring.

But there are still rappers you have to check in on, and Kanye is one of them, and if anyone has come up with a rhyme that is at once as intriguing, as giddily bonkers, and as culturally significant as “I am a god / … / Hurry up with my damn croissants,” from his Yeezus collection, I haven’t heard it.

I continue to be delighted by the rhymes that Colin Meloy reeled off during his career with The Decembrists. He may not have been the only lyricist in history to use words the words infanta, balustrade, tarlatan, and consumptive, but I will bet cash money he’s the only one who used all of them at least once. So if he rhymes Odalisque and horribly, I know that he’s got a broad vocabulary, it’s all on tap, and he’s been doing that sort of thing for a while. His rhymes are beyond me, but I don’t consider them beyond him. I expect that sort of thing from Meloy.

But how does anyone realize that God and croissant rhyme? Is it stupidity? Is it genius? Handel is considered by many to be a genius, and somehow that rhyme escaped him. Shirley Caeser? U2? Nope and nope, they missed it too. (Anyone know a precedent?)

The first part of “I am a God / … / Hurry up with my damn croissant,” goes all-in on hyperbole, but then the second part makes Kanye sound like a petulant twit. He could’ve gone with “Hurry up with my damn Cristal.” That would have approximately rhymed approximately as well, and it would have been consistent with the rest of the lyrics and the music, which are so serious you can almost hear the Art oozing from the seams. But he didn’t.

So the thing is that not only does Kanye come up with this rhyme but, well, he’s Kanye. Everything this guy says or sings has to be interpreted in the context of who he is. That’s just the burden of being Kanye. But he is Kanye, after all, and he has to be aware of that burden, doesn’t he?

How much self-awareness does Kanye have? Here you’ve got a guy with a notoriously inflated sense of self-importance. But then, when he boasts that he is a god, “…chilling / Trying to stack these millions…,” well, how hyperbolic is that really? A heck of a lot less than if just about anyone else were to claim being a god. Me, for example.

And very shortly after that, he complains about not getting his croissants quickly enough.

In the Old Testament, a jealous god smites a lot of people in an inspired number of ways for a variety of reasons, but not once does he express impatience with anyone for a failure to retrieve a pastry for him with adequate alacrity. There are stories in many traditions of gods being petty, but I’m not aware of many stories of gods being quite so trivial.

The question elevates what might have been simply a toss-off rhyme to A Mystery.

When Kanye brings up croissants, is he conflating a minor irritation with open defiance, because it’s all a lack of deference, and, to gods, scale and degree are irrelevant? Has Kanye, like so many other people with not enough time to stack their millions, developed inflated senses of self-importance and privilege and decided they are entirely merited because he has millions to stack? Is the caricature of Kanye – self-important, self-satisfied, and humorless – who he really is?

Or is Kanye-the-artist just playing the character of Kanye-the-public-figure, performing the lyrical equivalent of a wink by bringing up croissants? The line is funny. Is he telegraphing that he knows that a load of cash is not anywhere near equivalent to godhood, and that the boast of being a god is just that – a boast?

But why would he be deliberately funny only that once during a cut that in all other ways – lyrically, sonically – communicates nothing but seriousness and confident aggression?

The answers can signify. In the ‘70s, Marvin Gaye told us what’sgoing on. Only a few years later, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five sent usa message. What is Kanye saying today?

Apparently that the rich really are different from the rest of us. But whose perspective does he have? Daisy’s and Tom’s? Gatsby’s? Nick Carraway’s? Faulkner’s? Is he deliberately telling us or unintentionally showing us? Is he joking? Is he serious? Is he being clever or stupid? I will always wonder.