THE KANYE WEST COLLAPSE: A HISTORY

Kanye West, also known as Ye, is an American rapper, songwriter, and fashion designer. West has 18 million followers on Instagram and over 49 million listeners on Spotify, giving him a huge platform and influence to a large number of people. Prior to his scandals, West released many albums including Graduation, Life of Pablo, and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. All of them have over a billion streams on spotify. He also owns a very popular shoe brand called Yeezy which he is partnered with through Adias. West makes roughly $220 million dollars annually from Yeezy. In this article, Inkwell dives into some of West’s most impactful controversies.

West vs. Taylor Swift:

Dating all the way back to 2009, when Taylor Swift, singer-songwriter, won best female video award at the VMAs for her song and iconic music video “You Belong With Me”, West stormed the stage, dissatisfied with the results. He took the microphone from Swift and said “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time, one of the best videos of all time.” The camera then cut to Beyonce, nominated for her music video for “Single Ladies,” who was visibly mortified

For years, this outburst from West incited lots of backlash. Not only from Swift’s fans but from celebrities like Barack Obama, Katy Perry, and Kelly Clarkson. Many took to twitter to voice their disappointment in West. Later, Swift and West were able to put this incident behind them and become civil with one another. But, this peace wouldn’t last long. When West released his album, “Life of Pablo,” in 2016, it included a song titled “Famous,” featuring the now infamous lyric “I made that b*tch famous,” referring to Taylor Swift and the 2009 VMAs. According to a billboard statement made by a representative of Swift, she never gave West the approval for this lyric. On the other hand, West made the claim that between a phone call of the two of them, Swift pre-heard the lyric and gave him permission to use this line in the portion of the phone call released by West. In 2020, the entire phone call was then released (when only part of it was publicly released prior) proving Swift was unaware of the lyric and West didn’t run it by her beforehand.

West and Controversial Celebrities

In 2021, Kanye West hosted a listening performance for his new album “Donda.” But, during the performance, West brought Marilyn Manson

(who was facing sexual assault allegations) and Dababy (who was being called out for anti-gay comments) on stage with him. Because of this, West received lots of backlash from social media for associating himself with such controversial people. Some people believed this was West’s clapback at “cancel culture,” while others saw this as yet another childish outburtst.

This isn’t the first time West has involved himself with controversial celebrities. Back in 2016, West tweeted “BILL COSBY INNOCENT!!!!!!!!!!” after the comedian Cosby was charged with the sexual assault of over 50 women. Just like the Donda performance, the media expressed their frustration and disappointment, including other comedians Sarah Silverman and Billy Eichner.

West Running for President

Kanye West took to Twitter in 2020 to announce his presidential campaign, tweeting, “We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future. I am running for president of the United States! #2020VISION.”

West said that he would be running under the “Birthday Party” for his political party because according to him, “When we win, it’s everyone’s birth-

“When we win, it’s everyone’s birthday.” Unfortunately for West, his presidential dreams came quickly to an end after receiving just 60,000 votes and zero delegates. Only after he put 6 million dollars toward his campaign.

But, this wouldn’t be the end for West. Despite all the controversial incidents he has been in recently, in November of 2022 announced he will be running for president in 2024 and will have former president Donald Trump as his running mate. Because of his recent bans on social media the legitimacy of this announcement is not strong.

Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson

In 2014, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian tied the knot in Florence, Italy and even had four kids together. But, after seven years of marriage, Kardashian filed for divorce from West in February of 2021. Although they divorced, West and Kardashian seemed to be healthily co-parenting, until Kardashian hosted SNL in October of 2021. After Kardashian’s SNL debut, she started to kindle a relationship with comedian Pete Davidson, an SNL cast member. This didn’t make West happy.

The first attack West made on Davidson was in January of 2022 after he released the song “Eazy.” Which featured the lyric, “God saved me from that crash -Just so I can beat Pete Davidson’s a** (who?).” But this was just the beginning of the harassment that Davidson would receive. Rapper Kid Cudi was long-time friends with both West and Davidson, but, his friendship with Davidson became an issue for West. On February 12th of 2022, West posted a handwritten note on Instagram, stating, “Just so everyone knows Cudi will not be on Donda because he’s friends with you know who.” Cudi was quick with a response and commented “Too bad I don’t want to be on your album you f*ckin’ dinosaur hahaha everyone knows I’ve been the best thing about your albums since I met you.” West then posted a photo of all of them at Cudi’s birthday dinner from 2019, putting a big X over Davidsons face with the caption, ““I JUST WANTED MY FRIEND TO HAVE MY BACK THE KNIFE JUST GOES IN DEEPER.”

West doesn’t stop there. He then started posting private text messages between Davidson and himself. Davidson told West, “And you as a man. I’d never get in the way of your children. It’s a promise. How you guys go about raising your children is your business not mine. I do hope one day I can meet them and we can all be friends.” West then posted that with the caption “NO YOU WILL NEVER MEET MY CHILDREN.”

Not long after, Kanye uploaded a modified version of Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War, putting himself on the same side as Julia Fox, Drake, Future, and Travis Scott. And on the opposite side having Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Kid Cudi, and Billie Eillish. Uncoincedentally, those are all people he has had feuds with. He captioned the post “THE INTERNET HAS STILL NOT FOUND A DECENT PICTURE OF SKETE,” giving Davidson the derogatory nickname, Skete.

Then Kanye tells fans via social media, “IF YOU SEE SKETE IN REAL LIFE SCREAM AT [THE] LOOSER [sic] AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS AND SAY KIMYE FOREVER.”

Kimye refers to the portmanteau of Kim Kardashian and West’s names. Because of this outburst, West re- ceives a prompt text from Kardashian saying “ U are creating a scary and dangerous environment and someone will hurt Pete and this will all be your fault.” West then posts Kardasihan’s text with the caption “UPON MY WIFE’S REQUEST PLEASE NOBODY DO ANYTHING PHYSICAL TO SKETE IM GOING TO HANDLE THE SITUATION MYSELF.”

Anti-Semitism and Hitler

Just when you thought Kanye West couldn’t get any worse: well, he can. On December 1st, West went on the Alex Jones show and during the interview, West was praising Hitler and the Nazis, saying, “The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world.” This comment put right winged Jones in a difficult position. He tried to get West to backtrack and told him that they also did a lot of bad things. But, that didn’t faze or concern West because he responded, “But they did good things, too. We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all of the time.” The same day after the interview, West posted a photo of a swastika on his twitter, which permanently suspended his twitter account.

Because of all of West’s anti-semitic comments, his longtime partner Adidas, with whom he developed Yeezys, announced they were cutting ties with the rapper after almost a decade of working together.

As you can see, Kanye has many problems and can usually find a way to get out of all his controversial scandals. He is seems to be the only celebrity that could get canceled to such an extreme and still have his music be sampled at the Super Bowl.