New York Times Critic Jon Caramanica on the Life and Legacy of Virgil Abloh, Kanye West’s Trump Support, and the Future of Rap Mags
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“It’s been a tough week,” said Jon Caramanica, a music and style critic for the New York Times, at the top of this week’s episode of The Interview. We spoke moments after he filed a tribute to Greg Tate, a brilliant and inventive critic whom Caramanica had the pleasure of editing, and who died Tuesday at the age of 64.
“Everybody tries to copy Greg Tate,” Caramanica said. “You learn pretty fast that you can’t do it. It’s actually not possible.”
“He’s that dynamic, he’s that expansive of a thinker and a writer,” he said.
Tate’s death came just a week after Caramanica penned another wonderful tribute to Virgil Abloh, the prolific Black designer, art director, DJ, and one-man zeitgeist who rose to fame alongside Kanye West.
“I never met a person who is younger, who was in the game, or trying to get in the game, who had an interaction with Virgil, who he didn’t try to help,” Caramanica said.
“We could talk about, is Kim Jones a good designer? Is Daniel Lee a good designer? Is Demna a good designer? I don’t know what those folks do as far as mentorship. But what they’re not doing, is they’re not creating public models for how to be a designer, for how to live a creative life, and devoting a not-insignificant portion of their energy to giving the keys away.”
“The chasm that’s now left in the wake of Virgil’s death is so much vaster than just Virgil,” Caramanica said, pausing. “It’s all of the mist sparks that would have come. And that, to me, is the hardest part of it.”
Caramanica — who serves as pop music critic at the Times, as well as author of the Critical Shopper column and host of the Popcast podcast — is an expert on all things Kanye. He has interviewed him five times, most recently, and perhaps most memorably, in Wyoming for the release of the album Ye. He’s also writing a book about the producer-rapper-designer-billionaire-tabloid fixation, called Kanye: How the College Dropout Changed America.
I chatted with Caramanica about his interviews with Kanye, and if he could explain the rapper’s support for former President Donald Trump.
“There is a tremendous amount of similarity between like the arc of Kanye West and the arc of Donald Trump,” he told me.
Caramanica grew up in Brooklyn, and cut his teeth in journalism writing for a series of rap magazines before settling at the Times more than a decade ago.
We also discussed the future of print magazines, what it was like covering the music industry throughout a pandemic, and waiting for Drake to drop another great album.
Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read more coverage of The Interview on Mediaite.
