Parsing a tarnished idol

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This article was published 07/03/2024 (900 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Seth Zosky and CJ Capital used to idolize Kanye West. Then, their relationship with the superstar got a touch more complicated when their musical hero began to gradually, repeatedly let them down.

The first strike for Capital came six years ago when the hip-hop artist currently known as Ye suggested the transatlantic slave trade was the result of a choice made by enslaved people, placing the blame on the victims of 400 years of violent, systemic oppression instead of on those treating other humans as chattel.

“That was when I realized Kanye can’t be who I want him to be,” says Capital, 24, a Haitian-Canadian performer originally from Quebec. “That was the first moment I didn’t like Kanye the person.”

Zosky, who is Jewish, had a similar experience two years ago, when West made a series of antisemitic comments on the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ radio program, with the Yeezy founder saying that he “see(s) good things about Hitler.”

West — who has won 21 Grammy Awards across a 20-year recording career — had made headlines for his comments before, including his statement, made in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, that then-U.S. president George W. Bush didn’t care about Black people. He also had a memorable interruption of a Taylor Swift acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs — perhaps you remember it?

But for Capital and Zosky, the music was always so infectious, so polished and so groundbreaking that West’s bombastic and unpredictable personality could still exist on the periphery of his artistic self.

That began to change when the two superfans began to understand Kanye’s outsized impact through a more holistic lens.

No longer interested in defending their hero, but still influenced by his creative output — from The College Dropout to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, to Yeezy to Donda — Capital and Zosky started to interrogate the age-old question of art versus artist, of Kanye the man versus Kanye the rogue ideologue.

The result is Pain to Power: A Kanye West Musical Protest, premièring Friday at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre.

‘You wanna do whose music … where?’

As music theatre performance students at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont., Zosky and Capital bonded over two shared pastimes: basketball and hip-hop.

“We would hoop between classes, and we would bring the speaker along,” says Zosky, who’s originally from Toronto.

They both listened to Drake, J. Cole and Big Sean, but a frequent guest on their playlists was one Kanye Omari West.

In the dorms, Zosky would mess around on acoustic guitar while Capital laid down some rhymes. Those jam sessions led a Sheridan instructor to suggest the pair record their own music, which they did with another friend under the name CZN.

After graduation, Zosky and Capital’s careers took off, winning Canada’s Families Got Talent, an America’s Got Talent spinoff, and earning roles in television and stage productions.

Capital appeared in the CBC Gem show Top Line and the Disney kicks fairy tale Sneakerella; his costume included a pair of Yeezy sneakers he hasn’t worn since. Zosky performed at Toronto’s Olive Branch Theatre, Calgary’s Stage West and in Drayton Entertainment’s tour of Fiddler on the Roof as Perchik.

In 2022, Dan Petrenko, the former artistic director of Olive Branch, moved to Winnipeg to take over the reins of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre. Part of his new mandate, he decided, would be to produce a series of limited-engagement events — short runs of musical performances, such as this year’s Barbra Streisand tribute Gabs Sings Babs.

“Dan said, ‘You know what might be insane? If we did a show with the music of Kanye West,’” recalls Zosky. “And then we started talking about it and realized this could be cool.”

Zosky knew he couldn’t do it alone, so he called Capital to tell his friend about the plan for a show about West at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre.

“I was like, ‘You wanna do whose music … where?’” says Capital, laughing. “Then he explained the idea, about finding new purpose for this music we love, exploring our relationship to Kanye, and it started to make more sense.”

Over the past year, Zosky, Capital, Petrenko and dramaturg Tracey Erin Smith have been building Pain to Power from the ground up, assessing West’s musical output and its influence over Zosky and Capital’s ideas about creativity, performance and the power celebrities hold.

It was an eye-opening process for both Zosky and Capital, whose project follows a retrospective pattern similar to the recently cancelled NPR podcast Louder Than a Riot.

On that show, hosts Sidney Madden and Rodney Carmichael delved into hip-hop history to wrestle with many of their musical forebears’ misogyny. Like Louder Than a Riot, Pain to Power examines the repercussions of amplified forms of hatred while sorting through the intersectional mess it causes for a genre and its listeners, who often get maligned and misunderstood.

That’s part of what made West’s arc — at times triumphant and at others tragic — interesting to Zosky and Capital. For many people, West represented all of hip-hop — a weighty crown for an artist to bear.

At its root, Zosky says his and Capital’s show uses West’s music as an entry point for a thought-provoking conversation about heroism, friendship, masculinity and community.

Throughout the performance, Zosky and Capital will perform some favourite West tracks and a pair of original numbers, tracing their shared history with Kanye from its beginning to where it stands today.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com