JUNE PRINT EDITION
Dicks
Kanye West, Herman Melville, and the making of American art
June 18, 2025
Illustrations by Doug Bell
Illustrations by Doug Bell
In America, the popular arts reign supreme. It is an unfortunate truth, and I say this speaking as a literary snob, that you can take all the novels, poems, symphonies, and operas ever written by Americans and burn them in a trash can fire under the Manhattan Bridge without any great diminishment in the global storehouse of the fine arts. The American genius has always resided more in the hybrid arts, like popular songs and cartoons, than it did in forms that it borrowed from Europe. America is jazz, the blues, Tin Pan Alley, and rock ’n’ roll, musical theater, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis. It’s Tupac and Biggie. You take Samuel Beckett, and I’ll take Bugs Bunny.
The one and only time I ever met Kanye West was in a modest recording studio in Jersey City. Kanye was a young producer working on tracks for what would become Jay-Z’s 2001 album...
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David Samuels is the editor of County Highway, a new American magazine in the form of a 19th-century newspaper. He is Tablet’s literary editor.
