Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.Credit: nnasswain
“I got flashed by the paparazzi / I hate these n----- more than the Nazis!” rapped Kanye West (the artist who now refers to himself as Ye) with real bite on 2007’s Flashing Lights; a futuristic-sounding, violin-fuelled rap song.
Whether it was the way he elevated the blues with autotune (2008’s 808s & Heartbreak album), subsequently creating a lane for everyone from Travis Scott to The Weeknd to follow, or seamlessly merged ballet dancers with avant-garde raps [2010’s Runaway], the anti-fascist stance underpinned a pioneering artist who regularly made others question: how the hell did he do that?
Even further back in 1994, a student West can be seen in a photograph wearing a T-shirt that reads: “Say no to Nazis.” Yet just last week, during a particularly unhinged stream-of-consciousness rant on X, a 47-year-old West repeatedly expressed his admiration for Hitler, even referring to himself as “Yaydolf Yitler”.
He gleefully retracted a previous apology for antisemitic comments claiming a Jewish conspiracy in the music industry, typing: “I don’t even know what the f--- anti Semitic means. It’s just some bull-----.JEWS WERE BETTER AS SLAVES. YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR JEWS IN THEIR PLACE AND MAKE THEM INTO YOUR SLAVES!” Via an $8m Super Bowl TV advert West – with the manic energy of a Batman supervillain – then directed people towards a retail website where the only item on sale was a T-shirt sporting the swastika.
This hateful trolling followed a week of already febrile controversy around the artist, who arrived at the Grammys with his near-naked wife, Bianca Censori, before proudly posting on X that he had “dominion” over her life choices. This prompted online discourse around whether she’d been programmed into some sort of eerily compliant, new-age Stepford Wife. As part of his rant on X, West also went on to defend Diddy (“my brother”), currently accused of multiple sexual assault allegations, including the rape of minors.
West performs at the RBC Royal Bank Bluesfest in Ottawa, Canada, in 2015. Credit: Getty
Profiting from others’ pain, it seems, is now West’s primary focus. It’s an astonishing volte-face from a once beloved and pioneering artist who exposed hate in his raps – “Racism’s still alive / they’ve just been concealing it!” West barked on the soul-stirring Jay-Z collaboration Never Let Me Down – and often celebrated women, particularly his late mother Donda West (Hey Mama).
In the not-so-distant past, it felt like West moved from one lifetime achievement to the next, winning lucrative sneaker deals with Adidas that pushed him into billionaire status and sitting front row at fashion shows with Vogue’s Anna Wintour. But his U-turn into a pro-Nazi reactionary has been so vicious that an artist who won 24 Grammys was reportedly thrown off this award show’s Red Carpet following Censori’s stunt, and treated more like a pariah than a visionary. West also posted multiple clips of pornography during his recent shocking rants.
West claims we’re all witnessing “performance art” in real-time, something akin to the late comedian Andy Kaufman, and that his hate speech is really about showing the world cancel culture is no longer fit for purpose. His fans can’t work out whether the Gold Digger hitmaker – who in the past dedicated an album cover to revealing his destabilising bipolar disorder – is having a high-profile mental breakdown and deserves sympathy, or if West is now more interested in torching a legacy to become the hip hop Andrew Tate. Within hip hop circles, I regularly hear people justify listening to his old music by saying things like: “The old Kanye was a different person, so it’s okay!”
Just how did we get here? And can West really recover through the release of the aptly titled album, Bully, reportedly out in June? Since emerging as a mainstream force with 2004’s The College Dropout album, it’s fair to say the South Side Chicago-raised West has never been afraid to poke at the hornet’s nest. This record and its gospel-charged single Jesus Walks stood out amid a mainstream rap scene preoccupied by consumerism and sorely in need of deeper introspection.
West’s anti-consumerist leanings and wicked sense of humour made an instant impact on the pop charts, with his debut album selling more than 4 million copies and solidifying his rise from scrappy behind-the-scenes producer to the very core of the zeitgeist. The Village Voice’s Michael Endelman wrote at the time: “In a rap scene still dominated by authenticity battles and gangsta posturing, Kanye’s a middle-class, politically conscious, post-thug, bourgeois rapper – and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
This debut project heralded the arrival of someone who seemed to get a buzz out of speaking up against power; a rebel with multiple causes. Famously during this era, in a TV special designed to raise benefits for Hurricane Katrina victims, West snapped: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people!” With each subsequent new release, the music became more ambitious and experimental, never losing the feeling the lead artist was putting his reputation on the line to take sonic risks and speak up against injustices.
This fearlessness was intoxicating at times. On 2006’s Late Registration, for example, West called out the contradiction of rappers wearing diamonds that were picked by exploited child slave workers, this stinging social commentary juxtaposing boldly with lush, rich orchestral arrangements co-produced by Jon Brion. What many consider to be his magnum opus, 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was released in the wake of West storming the stage after Taylor Swift controversially won an MTV Video Music Award over Beyoncé; rightly or wrongly, it was a gesture he claimed was designed to fight against white pop artists getting preferential treatment over Black artists.
Then his punkish 2013 record Yeezus, which had a high-profile fan in Lou Reed, “exposed” the high fashion industry for being anti-black, accusing it of continuing slave era power dynamics: “My mama was raised in the era when… Clean water was only served to the fairer skin / Doing’ clothes, you would’ve thought I had help / But they weren’t satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself!”
However, as West became more and more famous, his lyrics became less focused and childishly provocative. There were lyrics about needing “sweet and sour sauce” when making love to Asian women and claiming he and rival Taylor Swift “might have sex” (Famous). Album release dates were rarely adhered to either, with West, who was previously seen as a perfectionist, instead giving the impression of someone rushing projects.
Yet critics tended to give him a pass for this behaviour. The fact West spoke so openly about having bipolar disorder and struggling with his mental health perhaps created sympathy, with many happy to excuse him as a tortured genius. This type of complex individual being married to one of the most photographed women on the planet – West’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian – was also seen as something that weighed heavily on the artist. Many wondered if West acting out was simply a reflection of the paparazzi hounding him and his wife wherever they went; the pressure becoming too much.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West attend the Travis Scott Astroworld Tour in 2018.Credit: Getty
In many ways, the post-Yeezus years felt like a real turning point; the moment West embraced nihilism and controversy over any coherent societal message. And with his attention split on making a splash in the fashion world, the music itself started to feel like an afterthought and hastily stitched together, something personified by the 2018 single Lift Yourself, where the lyrics repeated the immature refrain: “Poopy-di scoop.” The West of the past would have likely used this graceful soul beat to rap a fiery verse ridiculing yuppies, but here he was merrily making poop noises.
Each project tended to be superseded by the wild, puerile things (like comments to TMZ around “slavery being a choice” Black people willingly made) West uttered in interviews. It seemed like West got a kick out of being a contrarian (in a stunt to promote 2021’s Donda album he brought out Marilyn Manson – who was then facing multiple allegations of sexual assault – during a stadium-sized show) and the music itself sounded stale.
It was hard to shake off the feeling West was simply weaponising hate to become a trending topic, and the Donda album marked a turning point where critics started to switch on West too, with it only picking up a score of 53 on Metacritic. The A.V. Club summarised this shift in mood well with its review: “More than half of this album is complete filler ... On this record, there is none of the production genius we’ve come to expect from West ... No one edits West anymore, not even himself. And that’s a damn shame.”
The world tours stopped, and an artist who used to be inescapable on the radio was now releasing songs that seemed to come and go. Politics seemed like more of a focus to West and he ran for president in 2020, determined to become a Black Trump figurehead by speaking off-the-cuff about abortion and the shortcomings of liberals. But when West cried at one political rally, revealing Kim Kardashian had aborted a child, it was clear this was a stage far too big for him. Regardless, he linked himself with controversial alt-Right political commentators like Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, wearing Trump’s red Make America Great Again hat with real pride.
President Donald Trump meets with rapper Kanye West in the Oval Office of the White House in 2018.Credit: Getty
This was something jarring for early fans, who looked up to West for the way he once eviscerated Reaganomics and Republican political (see the song Crack Music) ideals. But even Trump, who started out as an ally, distanced himself from West as the diatribes got darker. West’s embrace of Christianity and church-based concerts also looked more like a smokescreen to cushion his political activity. Things came to a head at the end of 2022, when he Tweeted about the need to go “death con 3 on the Jewish people.”
Since that tweet, West had been more out of the spotlight, relocating to Japan and many believing his relationship with Censori might have helped him to heal. But last week’s influx of pro-Nazi rants suggest little progress has been made, with Kanye now looking more and more like an empty provocateur, clutching to controversy because the music (his last two albums, Vultures 1 and 2, have been slammed by many critics for sounding lazy and incoherent) isn’t as good as it used to be.
Like many Kanye West fans, the recent controversy has made me consider why I fell in love with his music in the first place. To me, he always felt more like a life coach than a rapper; someone whose giddy confidence (the artist once remarked: “My biggest regret is not being able to go see myself play live”) was infectious and made you feel empowered. I could put on a song like Champion and feel that Kanye, with his lyrics about transitioning from being “invisible to invincible”, was speaking directly to those at the bottom and making their dreams feel tangible.
When things got too serious, he always had a cutting joke (“I’m like a fly Malcolm X, buy any jeans necessary” is a personal favourite); this was an artist in complete control of the mood and tone. Yet this current Kanye West feels like a completely different person, which could explain why so many Kanye West fans indulge in conspiracy theories about him being cloned.
Perhaps last week’s pro-Nazi rants really are “performance art” promoting the looming release of Bully; a comment on how fame can twist individuals out of shape. More likely, however, they serve to illustrate a once-beloved artist breaking down on the world stage, experiencing ego death in real time and self-immolating their own legacy. If indeed the latter, there is perhaps no logic to find behind West’s actions; the better solution could be to ignore them altogether.
The Telegraph, London