It’s surprising that a global celebrity who frequently self-identifies as the greatest artist living or dead has become an everyday presence in a tightly connected town of about 10,000 people. It’s more surprising just how much the town’s leaders want him to stay.
There Kanye West is at the McDonald’s, the Best Western and the Boot Barn. He hangs out at the Cody Steakhouse on the main drag, where he met one of his intern videographers, a student at Cody High School. His ranch is close to town, and to get where he needs to go, Kanye drives around town in a fleet of blacked-out Ford Raptors, the exact number of which is a topic of local speculation. Gina Mummery, the saleswoman at the Fremont Motor Company dealership, would only say that she sold him between two and six.
Kanye started taking trips to Wyoming regularly in 2017, shortly after he was hospitalized for what was characterized on a dispatch call as a “psychiatric emergency.” He spent lots of time making music in the state in 2018, holding an incredible listening party for his album “Ye” in late May in Jackson, a town famous for its skiing, fishing and ultrawealthy residents.
And then, in September, The Cody Enterprise reported that he’d bought a property called Monster Lake Ranch, about eight miles outside Cody, which is a five-hour drive northeast from Jackson. Suddenly, he and his family, including his spouse, Kim Kardashian West, who is an entrepreneur, television star and law student, were there: zooming around on four-wheelers, crashing wedding preparations and shopping for clothing and jewelry on the town’s main street, Sheridan Avenue.
Since then, Kanye has recorded portions of his ninth studio album, “Jesus Is King,” in Cody. He purchased about 11 acres of commercial property within the town’s limits. He also purchased a second ranch about an hour away in the town of Greybull.
He has moved members of the Yeezy team into the area. In plans submitted to the city, he has detailed his intention to establish a prototype lab for the brand, in a warehouse on Road 2AB.
And he has been characteristically forthcoming about his long-term intentions. He has talked about going from “seed to sew” in Cody — that means farming the raw material and doing the manufacturing all in one place. He’s said he hopes the town will be for him what Dayton, Ohio, was for the Wright brothers.
But in the past several years, Kanye has announced so many plans. That he wants to start a church. That he plans to run for president in 2024. That he will invent a method for autocorrecting emoticons. That he aims to redesign the standard American home. That he might legally change his name to “Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West” for a year.
It can be hard, with Kanye West, to separate concrete plans from jokes, fancies or outlandish aspirations. For now, the people of Cody have to wait and see what develops. (...)
Cody was brought into being by Buffalo Bill Cody, another bombastic showman who was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the biggest celebrity in the world. More famous in his time than Theodore Roosevelt and better-traveled than the Grateful Dead in ours, Buffalo Bill basically invented the fantasy of the American West through his touring Wild West Show.
Founding a town in Wyoming was just one of Buffalo Bill’s many late-life enterprises. It has proved, in some ways, to be his most concrete legacy.
Cody was incorporated in 1901, becoming “the new center of William Cody’s continuing, almost manic entrepreneurialism,” the historian Louis S. Warren wrote in his 2005 book “Buffalo Bill’s America.”
Buffalo Bill advertised Cody in a Wild West show program, promising air that was “so pure, so sweet and so bracing” that it would act as an intoxicant to city-clogged lungs. In reality, the settlement was plopped down in the arid Big Horn Basin where the wind rarely stops blowing and there was once so much sulfur in the river that it was known as Stinking Water.
by Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elliot Ross
[ed. Surreal.]
There Kanye West is at the McDonald’s, the Best Western and the Boot Barn. He hangs out at the Cody Steakhouse on the main drag, where he met one of his intern videographers, a student at Cody High School. His ranch is close to town, and to get where he needs to go, Kanye drives around town in a fleet of blacked-out Ford Raptors, the exact number of which is a topic of local speculation. Gina Mummery, the saleswoman at the Fremont Motor Company dealership, would only say that she sold him between two and six.
Kanye started taking trips to Wyoming regularly in 2017, shortly after he was hospitalized for what was characterized on a dispatch call as a “psychiatric emergency.” He spent lots of time making music in the state in 2018, holding an incredible listening party for his album “Ye” in late May in Jackson, a town famous for its skiing, fishing and ultrawealthy residents.And then, in September, The Cody Enterprise reported that he’d bought a property called Monster Lake Ranch, about eight miles outside Cody, which is a five-hour drive northeast from Jackson. Suddenly, he and his family, including his spouse, Kim Kardashian West, who is an entrepreneur, television star and law student, were there: zooming around on four-wheelers, crashing wedding preparations and shopping for clothing and jewelry on the town’s main street, Sheridan Avenue.
Since then, Kanye has recorded portions of his ninth studio album, “Jesus Is King,” in Cody. He purchased about 11 acres of commercial property within the town’s limits. He also purchased a second ranch about an hour away in the town of Greybull.
He has moved members of the Yeezy team into the area. In plans submitted to the city, he has detailed his intention to establish a prototype lab for the brand, in a warehouse on Road 2AB.
And he has been characteristically forthcoming about his long-term intentions. He has talked about going from “seed to sew” in Cody — that means farming the raw material and doing the manufacturing all in one place. He’s said he hopes the town will be for him what Dayton, Ohio, was for the Wright brothers.
But in the past several years, Kanye has announced so many plans. That he wants to start a church. That he plans to run for president in 2024. That he will invent a method for autocorrecting emoticons. That he aims to redesign the standard American home. That he might legally change his name to “Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West” for a year.
It can be hard, with Kanye West, to separate concrete plans from jokes, fancies or outlandish aspirations. For now, the people of Cody have to wait and see what develops. (...)
Cody was brought into being by Buffalo Bill Cody, another bombastic showman who was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the biggest celebrity in the world. More famous in his time than Theodore Roosevelt and better-traveled than the Grateful Dead in ours, Buffalo Bill basically invented the fantasy of the American West through his touring Wild West Show.
Founding a town in Wyoming was just one of Buffalo Bill’s many late-life enterprises. It has proved, in some ways, to be his most concrete legacy.
Cody was incorporated in 1901, becoming “the new center of William Cody’s continuing, almost manic entrepreneurialism,” the historian Louis S. Warren wrote in his 2005 book “Buffalo Bill’s America.”
Buffalo Bill advertised Cody in a Wild West show program, promising air that was “so pure, so sweet and so bracing” that it would act as an intoxicant to city-clogged lungs. In reality, the settlement was plopped down in the arid Big Horn Basin where the wind rarely stops blowing and there was once so much sulfur in the river that it was known as Stinking Water.
by Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elliot Ross
[ed. Surreal.]
