James Walton

Time to take your meds, Kanye

Plus: the bleak tragedy of being a Bay City Roller

One of the doc's trickier tasks was to persuade us that a rapper saying weird things is something we should be worried about. Photo: Rachpoot / Bauer-Griffin / GC Images 
issue 01 July 2023

No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone off on an earnest quest to investigate a touchy subject and reached his conclusions only after the most extravagant of brow-furrowing. There is, however, a perhaps unexpected twist: the resulting programmes are rather good, creating the impression – or even reflecting the reality – of a man determined to get to the often dark heart of the matter.

For a while, it did look as if the programme’s main appeal might be as a comedy of liberal discomfiture

In the past, Azhar has applied his methods to such issues as the long-standing effect of the Satanic Verses controversy and why British Muslims joined Isis. On Wednesday he used them to tackle what at first sight appeared a less obvious cause for concern – the increasingly strange behaviour of Kanye West, or ‘Ye’ as he prefers to call himself these days.

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