By Jabari Asim
Monday, January 30, 2006 12:00 PM

WASHINGTON -- The wonderful thing about pop culture is that you never know where it's going to take you. You could begin with a French philosopher's thoughts on photography, for example, and end up with a rapper's musings on faith and humility. That's what happened to me when I saw Kanye West dressed as Jesus on the cover of Rolling Stone.

I was trying to forget pictures I'd just seen of Michael Jackson dressed as a woman in Bahrain when I came across a quote from the philosopher, Roland Barthes, in a newspaper article. Barthes liked to talk about the transformative power of photography, how the act of being photographed affects us. "From the moment I feel I am in the camera's eye, everything changes," he wrote. "I begin to pose, I immediately create a different body, I change even before the image."

The kind of shape-shifting that Barthes described doesn't sound far-fetched in the case of West, one of the most popular recording artists in the country. He makes his living adopting convincing guises through his music -- the clever dropout, the scorned lover, the tormented soul. Why not expand his repertoire to include a man viewed by many as the son of God?

West's fondness for the man from Galilee is well-known, thanks to "Jesus Walks," one of his many smash hits. The song's second verse declares,

They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus

That means guns, sex, lies, videotapes

But if I talk about God my record won't get played, huh?

Obviously "they" were wrong.

Perhaps West's phenomenal success and dramatic refutation of the naysayers in the recording industry are what makes him so sure of himself these days. In previous interviews, he admitted to being a "garbage-talker" and apparently has little use for that little thing Jesus said about "blessed are the meek."

He told Rolling Stone, "In America, they want you to accomplish these great feats, to pull off these David Copperfield-type stunts. But let someone ask you about what you're doing, and if you turn around and say, `It's great,' then people are like, `What's wrong with you?' You want me to be great, but you don't ever want me to say I'm great?"

West knows it's hard to argue with that, which is probably why he posed as Muhammad Ali in the same issue. But that kind of confidence is commonplace in rap, even among the lesser talents. West used to demonstrate a charming refusal to take himself too seriously, a refreshing stance in a musical genre too often defined by self-aborption -- an imagined self, really, that flaunts a limited vocabulary, sexual prowess and a seemingly endless capacity to break bones and bust caps. Amid so many crotch-grabbing legends in their own minds, West's willingness to laugh at his own shortcomings stood out.

West's decision to don the crown of thorns may also be a winking acknowledgement that rap, like politics, is a field in which the messianic impulse is both cultivated and encouraged. We Americans are vulnerable to the notion that a single anointed individual can deliver us from whatever ails us -- dull rap, economic stagnation, the heartbreak of psoriasis. Irrational exuberance and unreal expectations are attached to anyone with a platform -- from Jay-Z to Alan Greenspan.

The former was among the most successful at invoking this strain in hip-hop, linking himself to Jehovah and positioning himself as the savior of rap:

Hello, it's Hova; that's right young'un the wait is over

The new millennium is upon us, the album is here ...

There have been others, for instance, ODB, the rapper who briefly called himself Big Baby Jesus. Let's not forget P. Diddy -- heaven forbid! -- who did time on the cross in Nas' "Hate Me Now" video.

Michael Jackson must have given this some thought as well. He reportedly owns a reproduction of The Last Supper with himself occupying Jesus' place at the table. I suppose musing on that could lead me down some other intriguing path, but no thanks. This time, I don't even want to go there.