The artist formerly known as Kanye West may be enjoying a triumphant return to the stage, but not everyone is clapping.
Ye, as he is now known, was recently banned from traveling to the United Kingdom amid continued concern over his past antisemitic remarks and the festival he was due to headline there was canceled because of the ban.
That decision came days after two sold out shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, in support of his new album “Bully,” which just debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Clips of those concerts — showing other celebs jamming to his tunes and Lauryn Hill joining him on stage on a set designed to look like the literal top of the world — went viral.
The dichotomy of a star both banned and celebrated perfectly encapsulates Ye’s decades long career.
While other celebs have maintained their fan base in the face of controversy, few have managed to pull off maintaining the continued support he has — especially given the cycles of him offending swaths of people, offering contrition and then doing it all again.
Che Pope, a longtime collaborator and friend of Ye’s, said the man who has done everything from producing some of the biggest names in the industry to launching his own successful fashion brand is simply being himself.
“Having seen the world and trying to see it through various lenses, he has his opinions of it,” Pope told CNN. “And he’s very fearless.”
He’s also very complicated.
Ye has been open over the years about his troubles, from rapping about substance abuse to discussing his mental health struggles, and this time is no different.
In January, he took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to apologize for some of his past remarks, some of which were antisemitic and some of which were anti-Black, attributing them in part to an undiagnosed brain injury from a car accident and untreated bipolar disorder.
If the apology felt familiar, it may be because Ye has placed himself in a seeming loop of angering people with everything from his support of the MAGA movement and President Donald Trump during his first administration to selling swastika T-shirts last year before offering up mea culpas.
“I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” Ye wrote in the WSJ ad apology. “I love Jewish people.”
The ad paved the way for Ye’s new album and subsequent shows. The Wireless Festival in London may have been canceled, but the artist still has dates listed across Europe this summer, including Italy, Spain, the Netherlands.
On April 14, he said on X that he was postponing his show in Marseille, France “until further notice,” making a point to note that it was “my sole decision” to do so. Officials there had reportedly expressed concerns about the planned concert.
Yassin Alsalman, commonly known as the multimedia artist and rapper NARCY, questioned why more focus seemed to be placed on policing someone like Ye as opposed to someone like the president who has also repeatedly stirred controversy with his remarks.
“I would say what’s interesting about Ye is that he is able to, whether directly or indirectly, shed light on the double standard of society,” said Alsalman, who taught the course “Kanye vs Ye: Genuis by Design” at Concordia University in Montreal. “The double standard that he’s always shown is a reflection of kind of the artistic choices that he’s made in spaces that don’t usually allow those artistic choices.”
If Ye is in a loop of doing damage and then trying to smooth that over, Alsalman said he believes the rest of us “are caught in that loop with him, which makes us a part of the problem.”
“If we start talking about the platform, the idea of celebrity and how that needs to change, then maybe our relationship to him will change,” he said. “But now what we do, it’s like everybody is waiting for the crash out.”
Such crash outs have been as consistent as Ye’s stalwart fan base, a group that includes everyone from fans of the polo wearing, backpack carrying young man who burst on the scene with his debut album “The College Dropout” in 2004 to those who hailed him as a “free thinker” for attacking the Jewish community or saying that 400 years of African American slavery “sounds like a choice.”
Singer Aubrey O’Day found herself at the heart of the debate over Ye after attending his SoFi shows.
She had faced criticism online for attending the show while being a longtime critic of her former mentor Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was sentenced to more than four years in prison last year after being found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
The Danity Kane singer responded via lengthy statement on X that she “can hold two truths at once” and argued that accusing her of hypocrisy “ignores the nuance.”
“I’ve been vocal about abuse because I’ve lived it, and I don’t excuse it, ever. That hasn’t changed. But I also don’t believe engaging with someone’s art means I co-sign every opinion or action they’ve ever had,” she wrote. “If that were the rule, most of this industry-and honestly most of the world-would be off limits. What I don’t support is harm, exploitation, or violence. And I’ve been consistent about that.”
If history is any indication, it’s a discussion that will be had again.
