NEW YORK, Jan 8 — Back at the beginning of 2016, Kanye West was already sounding alarms.

On December 31, 2015, he released Facts, an out-of-nowhere harangue that insulted Nike, praised his wife’s business acumen and seemed to express sympathy for Bill Cosby. About a week later came Real Friends, as potent and dispiriting a catalogue of loneliness he has ever recorded, a song about how fame warps and traps, and no matter how high it brings you, will always yank you down.

These songs set the stage for one of the most productive, disjointed and confusing years in the life of Kanye. It was one that began with him seeking grace, in the form of music, and also ended that way, but for very different reasons, following his hospitalisation and his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump. And yet the Kanye of 12 months ago and the Kanye of today aren’t so far apart: Instability, loneliness, a sense that he was being treated unfairly, a continuing quest to be heard. West may be facing severe public scrutiny, scepticism and concern, but even during this most challenging stretch, there are clear bridges to his old self.

In the last year, he has been busy. He released an album, The Life of Pablo, then continued to tweak it for a while in real time. He convened two runway collections of his Yeezy fashion line — one in Madison Square Garden, one in a park on Roosevelt Island. He had an art show in a Los Angeles gallery and teased a video game based on his mother’s journey to heaven. He sold merchandise in a few dozen pop-up shops around the world and released several iterations of his signature sneaker. And he performed dozens of nights of a tour that remade the proportions of arena concerts.

Though there were bumps along the way — the uncertain rollout of Pablo, the collapsing models (and shoe heels) at Roosevelt Island — the first nine months of the year were West firing on all pistons, and meeting with success.

But the final three months of 2016 spiralled well beyond his control. First came the robbery of his wife, Kim Kardashian, in Paris, a violent affair that included the theft of the 20-carat diamond engagement ring he gave her, worth a reported US$4 million (RM17.9 million). That was followed by the disruption of his tour, and its eventual cancellation, after a couple of speeches in which he spoke admiringly of Trump; his involuntary admission to UCLA Medical Centre hospital, followed by what will certainly be remembered as the most public crack of all: His meeting with Trump at Trump Tower on December 13.

Rupture has long been the axis around which West’s career has turned — where most artists seek to create smooth narratives about themselves and get everyone else to play along, he prefers disruptive leaps, quick reframing and firebrand positioning. Stasis is his kryptonite.

The ruptures are typically intentional provocations, but not always: The period of deep trauma following the 2007 death of his mother remains one of West’s most vital, influential and least understood times. The last three months of 2016 figure to be another such stretch. West dyed his hair blond, then multiple colours. In paparazzi photos, and even in the holiday-party family picture he posted on Twitter, his eyes are somewhere far-off. Since his hospitalisation, he has barely spoken publicly. When he and Trump descended to the Trump Tower lobby after their meeting, they were peppered with questions from the media, to which West replied only, "I just want to take a picture right now.”

West’s embrace of Trump, who spoke about black communities in cartoonish, inaccurate strokes ("They have no jobs, they have horrible education, they have no safety or security”), arrives at a particularly unlikely moment in his artistry. In 2013, he released Yeezus, an album full of industrial thump that featured some of his most acidic political commentary. It struck a confrontational tone that West carried through that year and the next.

By contrast, The Life of Pablo takes a turn to the ornate, the melodic and also the emotionally intimate. Ultralight Beam, the album opener, is a prayer. On songs like Real Friends and No More Parties in LA, West sounds exhausted and exasperated, while I Love Kanye is a withering self-assessment passed off as a taunt ("I miss the old Kanye”). And on FML, there was the spectre of psychological instability, a possible foreshadowing of troubles to come: "You ain’t never seen nothing crazier,” he rapped, than him when he’s "off his Lexapro.”

The Saint Pablo tour, which began in August, took the worship elements of the album and rendered them literal. Each night, for a couple of hours, West performed while tethered to a platform that dangled over the crowd and moved from one end of the room to the other like a warship. The optics were bracing: West was both a god hovering over his subjects and a slave bound for their entertainment. Below him, chaos and thrill. Above him, klieg lighting that baked and beatified him. The approach was also a stark contrast to his last tour, following Yeezus, which became well-known for lengthy speeches that veered between motivation and tirade.

But in November, that impulse began to return. In San Jose, he said, "If I would’ve voted, I would’ve voted on Trump.” In Sacramento a few nights later, he spoke for about 15 minutes before leaving the stage having performed only three songs. The remainder of the tour was swiftly cancelled, and a few days later, West was hospitalised, after police were called to perform a welfare check after an episode at his personal trainer’s home.

The low points of last year, whether a sign of deep trouble or just a momentary misalignment, have caused a radical shift in how West is publicly received. His weeklong hospitalisation, and the presumed illness that led to it, rendered him more sympathetic to critics, but his support of Trump was, to some, unforgivable. (That his behavior can cause offense is something he is warming to: Three times last year, he used his Twitter for damage control, an unfamiliar position.)

Embracing Trump is perhaps the most consequential political act of an artist who, at a much earlier and less sure-footed stage of his career, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina risked his mainstream acceptance to make a bold accusation on a national telethon: "George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

But he and Trump have parallels — both are vocal about those who they see as obstacles; both are steadfast in their self-belief. Perhaps West sees in Trump someone who freely speaks his mind and has been rewarded for it. During his speech at the Sacramento show, West referenced him as a sort of spirit guide: "Yeah, I’m taking his lead. I’ma just say how I say, be ‘Ye, and win.”

Read another way, West’s embrace of Trump — symbolic or otherwise — suggests an incipient nihilism at work. Rather than align himself with broader social causes — "I love being a voice of freedom when so many people are scared to speak up,” he wrote on Twitter in February — or the mainstream of black political thought, or even the politics of his wife, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, West’s unlikely shift suggests the manoeuvres of someone who no longer believes in the systems that have previously nourished, sustained and inspired him — someone whose sense of safety has been revoked. — The New York Times