It has been less than a month that Kanye West has been active on Twitter, yet he has already made quite an obtrusive impact in the cultural and political spheres. His reappearance on Twitter is the first time since his self-reported breakdown and hospitalization during the Saint Pablo Tour in 2016 that he has been a visible force within culture. Recently, he has reignited controversy surrounding statements he’s made regarding Trump, slavery, fashion, music, art, land development, fellow artists and philosophy. On Twitter, he has praised President Trump, a seemingly major departure from his older political messages, and in the same digital breath, called activist Emma Gonzales his hero. During his TMZ Live interview, he made comments surrounding slavery, stating that “when you hear about slavery for 400 years … For 400 years? That sounds like a choice.” His erratic, sometimes jumbled tweets have become their own memes, usually mocked for either their political nature or their pseudo-intellectual backing. Yet, this is all a symptom of what could be Kanye’s greatest intellectual gift—his ability to market in the wildest and most abstract ways his music, art and other pursuits.

Kanye is most adept at being able to shift the entire cultural consciousness onto himself and whatever he is creating and selling. Ye seems to follow the “all publicity is good publicity” motto to the utmost degree. For Kanye, controversy is his brand, and branding is everything in keeping people interested in you.  From his Katrina statements: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” to the infamous Taylor Swift incident, to his outrageous ramblings at the 2016 VMA’s and on the Saint Pablo Tour—where at one point he begged Jay-Z not to send “killers” at him—Kanye has built a brand image that involves him constantly being an outcast genius, a provocateur. In this image, he is both elusive and celebrated, called erratic, but backed by the idea that he regularly spouts: all geniuses are crazy.

Most artists of his caliber and influence tend to either follow established routes of promotion and marketing or are so revered within the mainstream as to simply be able to surprise-drop or lightly promote their albums, as in the cases of his friends and contemporaries, Beyonce and Jay-Z. Or, in the case of artists such as Frank Ocean and to some extent Kendrick Lamar, they are able to maintain interest in their work through their reclusive, mysterious nature.

Kanye, on the other hand, has taken another route entirely. Kanye’s marketing of himself, his brand and his art exists within the nature of the spectacle. He presents his work in spectacular, one-of-a-kind fashion, as something for his audience to be submerged in. Examples include his dramatic, artistic forays on Saturday Night Live, which he has used to premiere new music for his last three albums, and his ability to make forays into new creative outlets to support his album, such as the short film he released for “My Beautiful Dark Fantasy,” years before anyone else in popular music attempted such a feat (you can thank Kanye for Beyonce’s “Lemonade”).

However, nothing can match his promotion for “The Life of Pablo,” wherein Kanye presented his use of the spectacle as promotion to the fullest degree, using all avenues to build buzz around him and everything he was creating. Kanye used Twitter to drum up controversy, as well to tease the album, showing pictures of the handwritten tracklist complete with the signatures of collaborators. He changed the album’s name frequently and without discretion, at one point offering free Yeezy sneakers to whoever could guess the name from an acronym. He debuted the album through passing a literal aux cord among him and his peers, showcased in a live-streamed hectic show at Madison Garden, where at the same time he presented the latest looks from his Yeezy brand fashion line. It was a genius moment of timing, showcasing all levels of his creativity in one location. After the release of the album, he continued to tweak and change it, formatting it as a “living breathing changing creative expression.” To Kanye, controversy is everything, so why not completely delete the established idea of what an album is? He intentionally revamped the preconceived schemas of a music release.

For Kanye, keeping a constant buzz around his name is the key to success in all venues of his creative expression. In using Twitter as a launching pad for his unhinged ideas and thoughts, Ye brings us all along on a wild and intoxicating ride through his psyche and process of creation. The controversy is magnetic; “What will Kanye say next?” traps the mainstream into a constant, unpaid promotion of Yeezy. And with his eighth studio album set to arrive this summer, as well as a collaborative album with Kid Cudi, it can be hard to not notice the wave of attention he is mustering as another branch of his spectacle marketing.

So whether you love or hate his comments, it doesn’t matter; you’re thinking about him and his work, and that’s all Kanye wants.