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Five days before Christmas last year, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This confirmation was not shocking. This particular doctor’s appointment ended an emotionally draining process of nearly two years of endless tests, neurologist visits, and waiting times. I’m waiting so long. What I wasn’t prepared for was the emotional weight of it all.
Even if you know what’s going to happen, you don’t have a blueprint for how your emotions will react. Not necessarily now, but more importantly in the future. The gym was a safe haven, even though I didn’t achieve my six-pack goal (I still haven’t mastered my eating habits). There, AirPods provide a temporary escape from reality. And one song has been a mainstay, not just now, but for the last 20 years of my life.
Kanye West’s “Family Business”.
yes university dropout This weekend marks the 20th anniversary. The album is both a timestamp and a relic of an artist who became one of the biggest artists of all time and, more recently, a pariah. But there’s that album, and “Family Business,” which is the most personal song in his catalog to date. Do you take baths with your cousins when they are babies? I went there and got the scrapbook to prove it. Do you have multiple siblings or cousins sleeping in your bed? Done. Is your family arguing over silly things during the holidays? Oh yeah, we did that too. It may seem far-fetched now, but Kanye’s self-awareness on this record was paramount.
“Family Business” is a song that has always been in the orbit of my life for decades. This is a record that has taken on additional meaning and evolved sonically throughout my life. In 2004, during my last few months of high school, I was 18 years old and was shocked by that record. Five years later, I moved to Washington, D.C., and ten years after my uncle’s death, listening to this song while running to catch the subway was my spiritual way of connecting with my uncle in his city. In 2014, after his friend Yusuf committed suicide, the family business was a coping mechanism. So when I became concerned about my mother’s situation, this song naturally found its way into the soundtrack of my life. I needed it more than I thought.
“I get really chills just thinking about that song and that album. It feels like it happened five lifetimes ago at this point,” hip-hop historian and Chicago native Andrew Barber told me. . “Every time I hear that song, I still get emotional. It gives me a certain kind of feeling, but none of the other Kanye albums give me that kind of feeling.”
Who would have thought life would go so fast? you ask rhetorically about this song. Thankfully, my mother is still healthy. Her cognitive abilities have changed dramatically, but she is working on “getting through this.” Her thinking is inspiring. For conditions that directly affect the mind, it must be so. She is still the woman I have always known and loved. She is still a woman and the only person who has known me longer than I have known myself. And she is still the woman who never left my side, no matter what, from the courtroom to the hospital room. She is the woman who is still my heart and will have my heart for the next 100 lifetimes.
I first noticed a change in her around the spring of 2022. A few months earlier, she had been in a car accident and her car was badly damaged. She hasn’t driven since. By that summer, she had great difficulty checking her account or paying her bills, and she began having severe anxiety attacks. I was confused because her mother and grandmother had taught me everything there was to know about managing money. Over the next year, these changes became increasingly apparent. Her independence turned into even more dependence without her realizing it. She missed events such as baby showers and homecomings. Her extroverted personality gave way to her more introverted behavior. Watching her go through these changes, many of which she had no control over and no clue that they were happening, was among the best I’ve ever had to watch. It was one of the most difficult. It’s because now I can’t repay the woman who protected and saved me, at least not in a prayer-fulfilling way.
Who would have thought I’d have to see you through the glass??
That’s another rhetorical question Kanye asks on the record, and it’s the song’s most moving line. It’s strong because of my family ties and being an artist myself. A lot can happen in life in 20 years. When we wake up every morning, we all experience friendship, love, heartbreak, success, failure, betrayal, death, and so much more. That’s Kanye. That’s me. That’s you. What those experiences teach us ultimately determines the path we take.
“It really doesn’t seem like this person is the same person. And people change. Like I said, that was several lifetimes ago,” Barber said. “But this really was a make-or-break moment for Kanye.”
Kanye’s urgency was abundantly clear at the time. That’s still the case today. Back then, it was about understanding who we wanted to be, and bringing musical friendships from artists who felt they were on the verge of changing the world. Even if Kanye wasn’t speaking to you or for you at the time, there was an appealing sense of self-destruction about him. He was motivated to record an album that revealed every conceivable anxieties of the time, and it was powerful. Many of those insecurities live within us, and definitely within me too. What stands out above all else in “Family Business” over the decades, and many iterations later for Kanye and me, is loyalty.
“Whether it’s race, culture, religion or whatever, we’re all similar in more ways than we are different. We all have family problems and we all have problems within our families.” said Barber. “We have good families and bad families, but at the end of the day they are family. That’s why we love them. And it’s cool to see someone put it in that context.” was.”
My mother is scared. her wife is scared. we are all scared. Her mother has gone on and on about how she couldn’t wait to be her grandmother and mother-in-law. She gave her best example to her mother. she’s right. And she is my paternal grandmother who passed away after I was born. There was so much excitement in her voice. Now that I’m her father, those feelings are still there, and so is that fear. This was not what she had imagined. She worries that her own condition will only get worse and that she will someday. But she’s more worried that her son and soon-to-be-born brother won’t remember her than the other way around. If there’s anything that brings her to tears, this is it.
At the end of every conversation, I always tell her two things. “I love you, and I will never leave you.” When I say this, I often hear the haunting rhythm of the “Family Business” choir playing in my head. “All these fancy things / I tell you, all my weight is gold (everything that glitters is not gold, all gold is not real, the real thing is you )/ And all that I know, I know all these things.” Memories of my mom taking me to basketball practice, helping me with homework, and going to Blockbuster to borrow wrestling tapes on Fridays run through my head.
On any given day, when I close my eyes, I can hear her laughing and saying, “It’s Friday, so I’m not cooking.” I can still see her getting in the car with her best friends Colleen and Pam and heading down the highway to visit her alma mater, South Carolina State University. I can still picture her at her college graduation, accepting her degree from me, laughing and saying, It comes with me. ” I still remember the look on her face when she told me that her uncle had passed away and that her grandmother had breast cancer. She always calls herself “Scaredy Cat,” but she’s one of the bravest people I know.
Nothing can prepare you for a role reversal between parent and child. She will always be my mother and the respect she will receive from me will reflect that. But things have changed. This is the new reality. Promoting what used to be is counterproductive. Therapy taught me that. None of us can control the cards we are dealt. In life, your only choice is to keep them, fold them, or play them.
In 2024, the “family business” remains a source of solace for artists who have not had personal solace for years. This song doesn’t have all the answers, nor is it a foolproof manifesto for overcoming grief. It doesn’t have to be that way.
“This album was really the beginning of the end for this version of Kanye, because he became something completely different after that,” Barber said. “But every time I hear it, it always gives me chills and takes me back to that time in my life when I wasn’t sure about anything. Where life was going to take me, what I was going to do with it. I did not know.”
That anxiety still lives within me. What these two years with her have taught me is that it always will be that way. Instead of succumbing to uncertainty, we are evolving with it. She can’t worry about what she’ll be like in five, six, or seven years from now. When it comes to my mother, all that matters is the moment. Every phone call, every text, every photo or video is important and my wife and I send it to our family group chat or to the aura frame in my grandmother’s room. Every time I go home it becomes the most important thing in my life.
“Family Business” reminds us that chaos doesn’t overwhelm love. Love has a history, it has hardships, and it survives to tell the tale. That’s what I see when I look at my mother. She feels that way when she thinks about her. I now cherish countless memories. Not because I needed a reality check, but because I know life. Alzheimer’s disease could never defeat the woman God blessed me with to grow within and now protect.
Kanye West is no longer my lifeline. When you live for a long time, sometimes you become estranged from people. And musicians are humans too. People who are flawed, complicated, and hypocritical. This is about something other than what Kanye did wrong. But instead, I realized one thing that he was so wonderfully and objectively right about. Dropped out of university It’s a lifeline. Like my mother, “Family Business” is a record that I will never let go of.
Because, like my own mother, what you borrow can never be repaid.
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