Latest news with #Yeezus
Express Tribune
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Trippie Redd addresses Coi Leray feud and slams Kanye West's rage music claim
Trippie Redd took to social media on Monday to clear up rumors surrounding his ex-girlfriend Coi Leray and to respond to Kanye West's recent comments about rage music. The rapper addressed speculation that he had skipped Coi Leray's baby shower, clarifying that he had been blocked by Coi and her family from attending. Trippie stated that all communications regarding the event were redirected to her attorney, adding that he has already distanced himself from the relationship earlier this year. And b4 the actual baby shower happens just letting yall know she doesn't want me or my family there she said hit the lawyer 😂 — Trippie Redd (@trippieredd) April 28, 2025 However, the "Love Scars" artist was more vocal about Kanye West's claims that he invented rage music with his 2013 track "Blood on the Leaves" from the Yeezus album. Trippie disagreed, asserting that the genre's foundation lies with artists like himself, XXXTENTACION, Playboi Carti, and Lil Uzi Vert. He suggested that Kanye's ego may have prevented potential collaborations between them in the past. Trippie Redd snapped back at Ye when he said on Livestream that he 'invented the rage sound' — GoodAssSub (@GoodAssSubX) April 28, 2025 Meanwhile, Trippie appears to have moved on personally, recently posting a photo of his new girlfriend on Instagram amid the ongoing drama. While tensions with Coi Leray continue and disputes over music innovation unfold, Trippie remains focused on his career and personal life, showing no signs of slowing down
Atlantic
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Music's Most Uncancellable Man
A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life. It was inauguration weekend, and I'd been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world's most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn't heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I'd mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus. The bartender probably wasn't making a political statement, but the soundtrack felt all too apt for the dawn of the great uncancelling—the sweeping return of various disgraced figures and discouraged behaviors to the public realm. Donald Trump, a convicted felon, was back in the White House and naming accused abusers, quacks, and even Mel Gibson to positions of honor. Trend forecasters were proclaiming that Trump's reelection represented a cultural shake-up in addition to a governmental one, replacing the stiff moralism of wokeness with cowboy rowdiness and chic nihilism. Phrases such as ' the boom boom aesthetic ' and ' dark mode ' were being coined to describe the phenomenon of young people suddenly dressing like Patrick Bateman and availing themselves of the term retard. Given this climate, I thought maybe I could loosen up and try that whole 'separating the art from the artist' thing again. I'd not been boycotting Ye's music per se, but for the past few years, the disgust caused by his conduct had ruined the pleasure of stomping around to 'Can't Tell Me Nothing.' Now I could sense something shifting. The second Trump administration's flurry of disorienting news was already becoming soul-deadening. The bad actors who were reemerging seemed only energized by outrage. Exhaustion was supplanting my sense of ick. A few weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, the ick came roaring back. That day, a commercial aired directing viewers to Ye's online store, which he then updated to sell only one item: a white shirt with the black, swirling symbol of the Third Reich. When I pulled up the website to see for myself, I felt a few kinds of bad feelings. There was horror at the Nazism. There was embarrassment at the fact that I'd recently wanted to listen to this guy's voice again. And there was the sinking, instinctual understanding of what Ye was doing: testing how numb America has gotten. The shirt stunt was part of a sudden flurry of activity suggesting a Ye comeback campaign. He crashed the Grammys; he's prepping an album; he's hyping a cryptocurrency. All the while, he's doubled down on Hitler talk—and asserted his kinship with the second Trump wave. 'Elon stole my Nazi swag,' he joked in one X post, referring to the tech mogul's alleged Sieg heil; 'whit[e] guys have all the fun,' he wrote when Steve Bannon seemed to make a similar gesture. He's been filming podcast videos with an influencer, Justin LaBoy, whom he calls 'the culture's Joe Rogan.' He has described his habit of parading around his wife, Bianca Censori, nearly nude as if she were a pet, in redpilled terms. 'I have dominion over my wife,' he posted. 'This ain't no woke as[s] feminist shit.' Maybe Ye is saying what he truly believes. Maybe mental health is at play (he used to describe himself as bipolar; recently, he's said the accurate diagnosis is autism). Definitely, he's trolling for publicity. In any case, he clearly believes this moment is ripe for him to capitalize on. And perhaps he's right. Conservatives who are proclaiming a golden age for America like to talk about the fall of ' the regime,' a handy term to refer to any power center steered by liberals, including in the entertainment world. The idea is that we'd been living in a centrally planned culture of racially inclusive sitcoms and feminist pop stars, whose Millennial-pink kumbaya vibe was backed up by vicious online campaigns to shun the insufficiently woke. Now the entertainment regime is under assault through such means as Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center and the Federal Communications Commission's saber-rattling against broadcast networks. In the MAGA view, these efforts aren't dictatorial—they're liberatory. This logic is credulous logic, conspiracy logic, that tends to downplay a crucial driver of culture: audiences' desires. Certainly, the idea that 2010s entertainment was smothered by progressive politeness is overstated at best. The decade's defining TV show was the brutal, T&A-filled Game of Thrones. Hip-hop was driven by young rappers whose music and personal lives defined the word problematic (Tekashi 6ix 9ine, XXXtentacion, Lil Uzi Vert). And, of course, Trump's 2016 election delighted a whole new cultural scene: edgelords posting frog memes. The internet was undercutting old gatekeepers, turning culture—more than ever—into an unruly, competitive arena. If there was a regime, it was already weakening, not strengthening. Read: Kanye West finally says what he means Ye has long understood the crowd-pleasing potential of chaos over conformity. Though he once scanned as a liberal protest rapper—remember when he called out George W. Bush on live TV after Hurricane Katrina?—his misogynistic streak hardly made him a consensus figure. In 2016, he got into a spat with Taylor Swift by calling her a 'bitch' in a song; the resulting brouhaha damaged her reputation more than it did his. Even after he started praising Trump in 2018 and called slavery a 'choice,' he still drew major collaborators and successfully orchestrated hype for new albums. It was only in 2022 that he pushed far enough to experience something like full-on cancellation, by going full-on anti-Semite. He posted that he wanted to go 'death con 3' on Jews. He told Alex Jones, 'I like Hitler.' He posted a swastika on X. Consequences piled up: Adidas exited their billion-dollar partnership with Ye; Def Jam, his label, severed ties; Elon Musk, of all people, banned him from X. Yet even then, his career continued: He released an unconvincing apology to the Jews, put out an album full of big-name rap collaborations, and landed a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1. In that song, 'Carnival,' he compared himself to vilified men such as R. Kelly and Diddy. 'This number #1 is for … the people who won't be manipulated by the system,' Ye wrote on Instagram at the time. 'The system'—that term is pretty close to what people mean by 'the regime.' Ye wasn't wrong to suggest that important organizations had tried to marginalize him. But if someone booted out of the system can still hit No. 1, what does the system really count for? Maybe this: Even in a culture as fractured as ours has become, people intrinsically sense the existence of a 'mainstream,' shaped by widely shared beliefs, norms, and urges. Powerful institutions stay powerful by catering to that consensus. After years of Americans becoming more socially progressive—after a decade in which gay marriage was legalized and Black Lives Matter gained broad-based popularity —it made some sense that, say, diversely cast Marvel movies would be the mainstream and the erratic Hitler-loving rapper would be subcultural. Perhaps that's not going to be true for much longer. 'You are the media,' Elon Musk told his followers on X after Trump's reelection, speaking to a platform that, under his watch, has become overrun by white supremacists. Seemingly every other day, a pundit proclaims that Trump is spurring a ' cultural revolution.' The president may have been returned to office thanks in part to widespread dissatisfaction with grocery prices, but he was also helped by young people, typically our great trend-drivers, becoming more hostile to social-justice causes. And now here comes Ye, doing that thing you do when you think the masses will buy what you have to sell: film a Super Bowl commercial. Vestiges of 'the system' have, thus far, rebuked Ye's swastika shirt. Two days after the Super Bowl ad aired, the e-commerce platform Shopify pulled the plug on Ye's online store, citing a violation of its terms of service in a terse statement. Ye's talent agency dropped him, and according to his own post on X, a few employees on his Yeezy design team quit. 'Maybe one day they will understand why I had to do what I did, and one day they will forgive my method,' Ye wrote on X. As for that why: In his X posts after the shop was taken down, Ye said he started thinking about selling the T-shirts after seeing the swastika—an ancient symbol used peacefully in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions—on clothing in Japan. In his telling, the point is to shock people and show them how free they are to embrace things that society has coded as taboo. That's also the rationale spread by his defenders. Myron Gaines of the Fresh and Fit podcast, a prominent manosphere outlet, posted that Ye's 'genius' Super Bowl stunt probably got 'millions' of fans to buy the shirt—'not because we're Nazis,' but because Ye was flouting 'years of censorship.' To reiterate: The rapper openly admires Hitler and demonizes Jews. He posted that he made the swastika shirts to show 'that I am not under Jewish control anymore.' Gaines wrote that Ye has 'revenge to seek for 2 years ago when the jews launched a campaign to cancel him.' So these non-Nazis … just happen to use Nazi imagery while spreading the idea that the Jews are a shadowy cabal that needs to be brought to heel. In late February, Ye posted that he's no longer a Nazi; a few days ago, he wrote, 'Antisemitism is the only path to freedom.' The absurdity of these antics is so obvious that to expend effort condemning them can feel pointless. I sympathize with the rapper Open Mike Eagle, who posted a video calling Ye's latest phase a 'predictable meltdown nobody has time for.' He noted that Ye's shock tactics were largely getting drowned out by the drama caused by the Trump administration, and by broader shifts in the attention economy. 'Things have changed,' Open Mike Eagle said, addressing Ye. 'All the counterculture jive that you used to say, that shit is all mainstream now. There's just Nazis all over Twitter.' Ye may well see an opportunity in the fact that what once seemed insane now can seem inane. The institutions that helped us make sense of what's normal and what's fringe, what's upstanding and what's contemptible, what's true and what's false, are weaker than ever. But cultural change never really did happen through the dictates of regimes—it happens through ideas and attitudes moving contagiously, person to person. We absorb how others behave, what they react to and what they don't react to. Certain people will buy into Ye's posture of rebelliousness, and maybe even buy his shirt, and maybe even wear it on the street. The rest of us should try clinging to our disgust.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kanye West Claims He's Been Diagnosed With Autism
During a Tuesday episode of Justin Laboy's podcast The Download, rapper Kanye West revealed that he's been diagnosed with autism. 'I went to this doctor,' West, who now goes by Ye, began as he voiced the doubts he and his wife Bianca Censori had over his previous bipolar diagnosis. 'My wife took me to do that because she said, 'Something about your personality doesn't feel like it's bipolar, I've seen bipolar before.' 'And I've come to find that it's really a case of autism that I have,' he continued, clarifying that he was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and that his new diagnosis has helped him better understand himself and when his 'episodes' will come in. 'I watch for it beforehand, but other times it was just like, if you get to the point where it goes, you're gonna stay in that position for a while. It might go for three days, four days a week,' he explained. 'A lot of what was sending me into the episodes … the constant feeling of not being in control spun me out of control.' The Yeezus rapper added that he hasn't been taking any medication as he's worried it would hinder his creative process. 'I haven't taken the medication since I found out that bipolar wasn't the right diagnosis,' West shared. 'It's finding stuff that doesn't block the creativity, obviously that's what I bring to the world. It's worth the ramp-up, as long as y'all get the creativity.' West was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder after he was hospitalized for a psychiatric emergency in 2016. He often spoke about the diagnosis in the years to follow, rapping about it on his 2018 track 'Yikes' and disclosing the details of his episodes to David Letterman in 2019.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nick Cave reveals song he wants played at his funeral
Nick Cave has revealed the song he wants played at his funeral. The Where the Wild Roses Grow singer has opened up about his song choice. He was responding to a fan question on his blog, The Red Hand Files. The 67-year-old answered, "Oh, and Damian, please, 'I Am A God' by Kanye West." Nick's answer comes after his recent appearance on the BBC's Desert Island Discs. During the show, guests have to choose eight of their favourite records. Nick chose the same song, from Kanye's album Yeezus, as one of his tracks. "This became, weirdly enough, a kind of family song," he shared when he was talking about why he'd chosen it. "My kids love it, Susie (his wife) loves it, I love it. It's an extremely playful, extremely dark, complex song where on the one hand, Kanye is presenting himself as a god, and then towards the end of the song, he's screaming in terror." He continued, "It's an unbelievably deep song, in my view. This is a song that I value on a personal level, and actually I just think is a complete, amazing work of art." The Bad Seeds star has previously described Kanye as "the greatest artist" on the planet, saying in 2020, "Making art is a form of madness - we slip deep within our own singular vision and become lost to it. There is no musician on Earth that is as committed to their own derangement as Kanye, and in this respect, at this point in time, he is our greatest artist."
