Kanye West, Runaway, and the Aesthetics of Illegibility
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo
2019
Kanye is a genius
Kanye is a douchebag
Kanye is an artist
Kanye is an asshole
Kanye is a designer
Kanye is drunk
Kanye loves Beyoncé
Kanye loves himself
Kanye says George Bush doesn’t care about Black people*
Kanye is a pariah
Kanye wears a MAGA hat
Kanye has a mental illness
Kanye wears a MAGA hat again
Kanye is illegible
Runaway from Me Baby
“I'll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.”
At the 6:05 mark of Kanye West’s epic song “Runaway”, from his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, an extraordinary moment occurs as Kanye’s heavily distorted voice drops in on top of the song’s iconic piano motif. Though it’s impossible to discern what he says, many people have speculated it might be:
“Imma be honest...”
What follows is three of the most moving and memorable minutes of contemporary pop music history, a lengthy vocal solo sung through a vocoder that closes out the nine minute epic. Kanye’s production transforms his “singing” into an instrumental; fuzzed out, layered and warped to sound like a synthesizer or electric guitar, but laden with the raw emotional weight of a strained human voice. His words are completely masked by the electronic effects, yet the desperate gasps of breath punctuating the melody clearly remind us that we are listening to his voice. If we could understand his words, would we be as moved?
Emerging out of a period of self-imposed media exile due to extreme public controversy (post 2009’s “Swiftgate”), My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is considered one of Kanye’s best albums, a culmination of the strongest and most original musical elements of his previous work. The arc of the album addresses themes of celebrity and fame, decadence and excess, sex, race, and power, underlayed by Kanye’s unique ability to simultaneously self-aggrandize and self-deprecate, to express critical self-awareness and blunt ignorance, to be full of braggadocio and crippling self-doubt, to “toast the douchebags”. Aesthetically, the album is grandiose and gaudy, a maximalist montage that merges so many contrasting elements that it just shouldn’t work, but of course it does. It is a complex album, opening with Nicki Minaj in a fairytale British accent and closing out with Gil Scott-Heron’s emphatic repetition of “Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America…” Runaway’s outro acts as its emotional and conceptual core. For all of us that are caught up in the irreconcilable tension of all of Ye’s many contradictions, it provides a moment of catharsis, beyond the limits of language.
Of course this illegibility doesn’t mean it can’t be read, with the most obvious interpretation being that it viscerally represents Kanye’s frustration with being misunderstood, by his lovers, his fans, the media, the public. And given the criticisms of his singing talent and his use of auto-tune on his previous album 808s and Heartbreaks, it can also be seen as a form of vindication through technical mastery, channelling the critics and pushing his weaknesses to the extreme, to the point of artistry.
Kanye West’s public persona is as full of painful contradictions as his art. Each additional controversy he engages in adds another layer of illegibility to our (mis)understanding of him. His recent political positioning in support of Donald Trump has people, even some of his biggest fans, including myself, finally turning away from him, trying our hardest to tune him out. And yet, beyond his talent, it is this very illegibility that draws us in, that keeps us compelled, wanting to understand. I would argue that this is something that West not only does very consciously, but masterfully deploys, in art as in life, it is designed.
Don’t Mistake Legibility for Communication
“It's funny because I've made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.”
In graphic design, legibility is a central concern and criteria of practice. Designers spend countless hours searching for the perfect typeface, obsessing over the space between letters and lines, massaging the text just so, in order to create the illusion that what the reader encounters is not an arrangement of inky shapes on a page, but the clear voice of the author themself. Graphic design is a far broader field than this set of traditional typographic practices, yet the concerns for clarity and concision, of transparency and neutrality, of form following function, make up the ideological bedrock of the discipline.
Purely functionalist principles of design, ingrained in the discipline since at least the post-war period, were fundamentally shaken during the heydays of the 80s and 90s by the dramatically labelled Legibility Wars, pitting establishment Modernists in New York design offices against upstart Postmodernists in California who came of age alongside the Apple Macintosh. Just as design was starting to gain professional legitimacy (and big paycheques) from corporate America, post-structuralist literary theory was making the rounds in the academy, positing graphic design as a form of language, voiced through the new digital technology. The period marked the definitive shift from mechanical to digital production, opening up a seemingly limitless expressive potential for graphic design.
Cranbrook Graduate Program in Design poster, 1989. Designed by Katherine McCoy.
This freedom materialized in multilayered compositions of distorted and fragmented type, low-res imagery, and digital ornamentation; chaotic, dissonant layouts that shattered the rationalist grid, coalescing into a diverse but recognizable style that design critic Steven Heller famously targeted in his 1993 article The Cult of the Ugly. Though the article is more balanced than its detractors gave it credit for, Heller drew a hard line between good and bad ugly design, railing against the supposed vacuous experimentation of the latter and it’s blatant disregard of graphic design’s mandate of effective, read commercial, communication.
“The new young turks reject such verities in favour of imposed discordance and disharmony, which might be rationalised as personal expression, but not as viable visual communication, and so in the end will be a blip (or tangent) in the continuum of graphic design history.”
Meanwhile, David Carson, designer of RayGun magazine and all too-eager bad-boy poster child of 90s illegibility, famously stated:
Don’t Mistake Legibility for Communication. David Carson.
Though Carson was only one designer among many employing this new aesthetic, he was arguably the most influential. He translated the experiments coming out of places like CalArts into a rebellious and stylized “grunge typography” that proved equally viable for surf and music magazines as for corporate clients such as Pepsi, Nike, and Microsoft. Carson’s work became emblematic of a generation of designers rebelling against the status-quo and his collected works, The End of Print, sat on the shelves of most of the design students I knew back then.
In some ways Carson’s mass popularity vindicated Heller’s analysis of the ugly as a faddish, mawkish, style, but it also revealed a threat that lay just below the surface. The credibility of a profession, that had long (and desperately) fought for acceptance as a strategic partner to corporate America, was at stake. How could it argue for its exacting, rigorous and expensive methodologies, its encyclopedic brand standards manuals, while across the way designers were playing around slapping the equivalent of digital letraset over everything? How could it be taken seriously? Was graphic design (merely) a playground for individual expression or was it an objective form of commercial communication that produced quantifiable results and financial value. Could it be both?
Back in the academy, graphic designers’ research and experimentation was being influenced by an engagement with, or at least a passing interest in, poststructuralist critical theory. Poststructuralism in communication and graphic design shattered the objective, binary sender-receiver model, opening up a multiplicity of influences, meanings and impacts to the designed object. It argued that how content was delivered was as important as what. Katherine McCoy, then director of Cranbrook Academy’s 2D program succinctly summarized these investigations into the legibility/illegibility construct:
“Visual phenomena are analyzed as language encoded for meaning. Meanings are deconstructed, exposing the dynamics of power and the manipulation of meaning.”
McCoy’s statement opens up the political dimensions of illegibility. Whereas functionalist design is guided by the oft-lauded maxim of design as problem solving (what problems are never quite made clear), the poststructuralist approach sees how the act of design can be one of problem-revealing, self-critically exposing its own implicit biases, artificiality and contrivances.
As design discourse moved into the new millennium, it is perhaps unsurprising that the next fiery debate was about design’s social role and responsibility. Spurred by the reissuing of the First Things First manifesto in 1999, designers began to question graphic design’s historical proximity to advertising, asking if it could do more than simply sell, in theory if not in practice. Graphic design, and branding specifically, as the symbolic vector through which corporate globalisation was expressed, came under vociferous attack from the political Left, leading to deep existential crises for many young designers. Naomi Klein’s No Logo (designed by Bruce Mau) sat on their shelves alongside The End of Print.
Unseeing like a State
Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier
“I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people's bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.”
“Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in society–to vaccinate a population, produce goods, mobilize labor, tax people and their property, conduct literacy campaigns, conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation standards, catch criminals, start universal schooling–requires the invention of units that are visible. The units in question might be citizens, villages, trees, fields, houses, or people grouped according to age, depending on the type of intervention. Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored.”
— James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State
In Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, anthropologist James C. Scott describes legibility as a central element in his expansive critique of high modernism as an ideological political/state system. The imposition of legibility on a forest, for example, reconfigures it into a “natural resource”, as a quantifiable amount of timber to be exploited. This simplification not only changes our understanding of the forest, by excluding the complex web of relations (flora, fauna, social) that make it up, it also sets in motion its actual physical manipulation into a managed forest made up of ordered rows of same-aged trees ready to be harvested. The forest is lost as we begin to count the trees.
Scott’s comparison of a mixed temperate forest and an aisle of a managed forest in Tuscany.
Another of Scott’s examples describes the creation of fixed surnames for people that replaced local, customary naming practices. In Great Britain, the Welsh followed a Celtic naming tradition and did not use surnames until the 16th century, with significant holdouts until the early 19th century. To insiders, customary names were highly legible, with names carrying varied and at times complex meaning (specific to different stages of life, to generation, or in relation to who is being spoken to), but to state officials, dealing with a mass aggregate of people, they were highly illegible. The creation of fixed names, imposed by the state, created the precondition for its agents to unambiguously identify, monitor, conscript and tax the populace. My mother, born at the end of the colonial era in Vietnam, later in life sought to reconnect with her extended family, but found it next to impossible due to the arbitrary ways the French had latinized her family’s names.
These systems of legibility are applied and enforced across all manner of statecraft; the delineation of borders and property, immigration and citizenship, urban planning and infrastructure development, policing and profiling, etc. and are further entrenched through corporate management and marketing with the narrow motivation of ubiquitous profit extraction. Together, they work to create a selective reality based on technocratic, functionalist principles in order to achieve specific, measurable goals, leaving everything outside of this field of vision behind.
In the era of mass surveillance, social media, fake news, big data and AI, our legibility is made all the more pervasive and exploitable for a near-infinite number of often nefarious purposes. Legibility stands directly at odds with notions of privacy, every gesture is documented and measured, we are all celebrities to the big data platforms. And the more easily we are read, the more easily we can be manipulated. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica campaign/scandal that helped usher in the Trump presidency being only the most obvious example.
Illustration of La Charte des Valeurs Québécoises, a precursor to the CAQ’s Loi 21.
In Québec, the CAQ government’s Loi 21 (2019), banning the wearing of religious symbols by public officials in positions of “authority” is a clear application of imposing legibility onto a populous, creating categories of citizens and then segregating and sanctioning them based on these identities. It acts as a thinly-veiled tool to institutionalise racism (primarily against Muslim women).
Legibility could instead be understood as a process of commoning, facilitating the creation of shared knowledge and understanding within and between specific communities. But when imposed through the centralized power of the state, and/or to serve the ubiquitous profit interest of corporations, it acts as a means of normalizing and reifying a hegemonic order.
“Good design makes a product understandable.”
— Dieter Rams, Braun
What happens when the product is you?
Universalism and accessibility, as other ways to understand legibility, are lauded values in the practice of design today. Emerging out of User Experience design with the tacit challenge of making complex digital interfaces useable, the language has shifted to be framed under the rubric of social good/social innovation design. Oftentimes this work is done for government or para-governmental organizations or for “socially-responsible” companies, and much of it has to do with learning as much as possible about users and addressing their supposed needs. Though there’s little doubt these are both noble and practical goals, they are driven by a utopianism that blinds designers to the structural and implicit biases of the systems we are aiming to provide access to. Whose vision of the universal are we making legible? As a controversial example, specifically because it seems so anodyne, the energy graphic designers spend in “getting out the vote” can also frame voting as the only legitimate, or at least the primary form of political expression and engagement. We could also think of designers creating innovative green products, providing “access” to people’s honest concerns for the environment while still encouraging further consumption. Or the utopian design of sharing economy platforms, whose very basic premise is based as much in drastic income inequality as it is on access to open data. Though social innovation practice aims to (and sometimes does) improve existing conditions, how much of it actually reinforces the overarching status quo?
“Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.”
— James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State
Legibility in design is about a narrowing of focus, the elimination of distraction, on a conceptual, aesthetic and material level. It is also about visibility, the ability to be seen, read and understood. Framed as positivist and progressive, the primacy of the visible ignores that for many, especially the most marginalized among us, being seen can pose a direct and significant threat. Likewise, a focus on universalism and consensus ignores that societal change happens more often than not through political contestation and conflict. Thus, illegibility can act as a form of furtive community protection and resilience (an argument for exclusive spaces for marginalized people), or as a disruptive force upon the smooth surfaces of the status quo.
Making a blanket argument for illegibility in graphic design would be naive and irresponsible, but what possibilities might a re-engagement with illegibility as a design strategy offer? It could mean something as simple as shifting our focus to the local, nurturing vernacular modes of expression in counterpoint to globalising trends. Or pushing back against our designerly instincts for broad visibility, rejecting awards. We might also challenge our research approaches and the obsession with metrics in our briefs and deliverables, find different forms of value. It could mean “Throwing the Bauhaus under the Bus”, to borrow the excellent workshop title from designers Silas Munro and Ramon Tejada. And it could mean being deliberately and subversively obtuse in our designs, speaking only to a select few, or foregrounding the qualities of voice rather than the meaning of words.
Fundamentally though, an engagement with illegibility should also mean that we recognize the political complicity of the modernist ideology our discipline is rooted in, and if we are so inclined, inspire us to actively work against it.
* "I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, "They're looting." You see a white family, it says, "They're looking for food." And, you know, it's been five days because most of the people are Black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help — with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us!”
— Kanye West during “A Concert for Hurricane Relief" on NBC, Sep. 2, 2005.
