The two poles of commentary about Kanye West—he is a genius v. he is a monster—have reached a frequency and a pitch that makes both more or less inaudible. Luckily, the feedback loop of hysterical hatred and overcompensatory defense leaves a lot of room in the middle for more nuanced reads.

My favorite recent example is this week's installment of My Philosophy, by Larry Mizell, Jr., "The God Dream of Kanye West," in which he gets to a very personal celebration of The Life of Pablo by navigating the bumpy superhighway of West's persona:

All of our heroes are failed. None of our best options are good enough—and in the final shakeout, few are even that good anymore. Still, what is there but to be kind of like Kanye, aspiring to be your own best hero—because you too are failed, problematic, inconsistent with the person you dream of being. Okay, maybe not as problematic as Kanye. And certainly: not as talented.

Another highly recommended one is this empathetic personal essay by the mighty Molly Lambert (whose work is always worth seeking out), for the ambitiously reconfigured MTV News. Lambert leaps off from a line from West's song "FML" into a consideration of West's public grandiosity (most recently the backstage-at-SNL outburst) through the lens of mental health drugs—and the mark they leave on the psyche of people who take, and more to the point stop taking, them:

But hearing Kanye talk about going off his Lexapro, I started to reframe his recent run of Twitter sprees as something other than just record promo. By the time the audio of Kanye blowing up backstage at SNL was released, it no longer seemed funny.