In this 'DVD extra', we are joined by our friend, super knowledgeable and insightful pop culture writer Holly B, who takes us sad old deeply-uncool men on a journey through the weird world and arcane lore of the artist formerly known as Kanye West and now known as "that guy who looooooves Hitler". I don't know that we end up wiser exactly... but we certainly end up better informed and massively entertained. Or at least we would be entertained if everything about this weren't so awful. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 My old solo show, the Shabcast, on which Holly spent five episodes explaining Final Fantasy VII to me. Pex Lives: A Doctor Who Podcast (Shabcast) (libsyn.com)
Do you think there's ever been an example of something like this happening before?
Someone who was this well-known just completely committing reputational suicide like this?
Because I've been talking about it with my family.
My dad mentioned David Icke, but David Icke was never a celebrity like Kanye.
No.
That's the one that immediately springs to mind, but that's very British, and it's very television, and it's very 1980s, or 90s, whatever it was.
It's very local compared to Kanye.
I think J.K.
Rowling's milkshake ducking, that might be the closest I can think of.
J.K.
Rowling, it's more gradual.
I mean, this is one of the things I've been reading up a little bit about Kanye, and it's not quite as sudden as it looks from the outside.
Clearly, this has been boiling over for a while.
It has been boiling over for a while, but I can say it has got Exponentially worse in the past couple of months.
Since the divorce, his public profile has really flatlined.
But it was clear he was, I think it's fair to say, struggling for a long time before that.
And also there's plenty of extremely red flaggy personality traits, shall we say.
I think one of the things that's going to be on the mind of anyone who cares about Kanye is how much of this was going to happen anyway.
How much of this is mental illness and how much of this is him being an asshole?
It doesn't really matter that much because it's only to do with what's in his head.
Yeah.
And how much of it is him falling under the influence of this particular set of people?
Because it's pretty clear to me that he's not just... He's been anti-Semitic for a while.
There's stories about him going back quite a way.
But what he's doing now is coming out with stuff that you can tell it comes straight from Fuentes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like when he says to Alex Jones, well, Obama killed Palestinians.
You know, that's right out of the fucking neo-Nazi pretend to give a shit about Palestinians playbook.
Yeah, absolutely.
There is actually one other rapper who I think is, I think he did something similar to this.
And I don't know if you were up on it when this happened, but do you remember when B.O.B.
became a flat earther?
I have no idea who B.o.B.
even is.
Well, this is it.
B.o.B.
was nowhere near as major a star as Kanye.
He was a pop rapper who had a couple of acclaimed mixtapes in the late 2000s and a couple of pretty major hits around 2010.
You remember that Price Tag song with Jessie J?
He did the rap guest verse on that.
There was another song he did with Airplanes, which had like an Eminem guest verse, which was huge.
And Hayley Williams on the hook from Paramore, you know, so he was like one of those radio rappers who was just kind of everywhere.
He dropped off the face of the planet for a while because he wasn't getting any chart hits, and then suddenly reemerged with a diss track against Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The reason I'm thinking of this is because one of his lines was something about, and that's why the president wears a yarmulke, which was reminiscent of Kanye's completely incoherent jump into the idea that Obama was not the first black president and was actually a Jewish president.
I take that as slightly a Black Hebrew Israelite thing, although Kyrie Irving is obviously playing with those ideas pretty overtly.
I don't see a lot of that in the rest of what Kanye has been saying.
No.
This is one of the things with Kanye.
There is quite a lot of Black Hebrew Israelitism in hip hop.
But Kanye at this point is just totally incoherent.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Wow.
We've got an episode for you today, which is about a topic that barely anybody else on the internet is talking about.
This is a real obscure niche piece of news.
We're going to be talking to you about what, I believe he's a rapper of some kind, Kanye West, or now he's called Ye, apparently.
Can I interrupt you, Jack?
Please do.
This is our special guest, Holly, by the way, who's now going to tell us all about, because I'm a very, very old man and I was never, even when I was young, I was never hip to the popular beat rhythm combos.
So I'm going to need some help.
Okay.
I just want to, Jack, so you know all about Tim Poole, but you don't know anything about who Kanye West is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is the sad position in which I find myself.
Yeah.
Everyone on this podcast goddamn sucks.
Okay.
So anyway, that's what I'm here for.
That's fair.
Yeah.
No, no.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, to be fair, I think the fact that Jack knows as much about Tim Poole as he does is mostly because of my influence, but I spread my nerdery around to the rest of the planet.
Well, fortunately, I'm here to expose you to some genuine art and some culture.
Yeah.
Holly, everybody, rap expert.
I do not consider myself a rap expert, but I'm reasonably fluent in Kanye West.
I should probably just lay out my biases before we begin.
I'm primarily an Eminem fan, so any of you who are listening to this who are Kanye fans, you probably have certain ideas about Eminem fans and the fact that we're all trashy and uncouth and like bad music.
All I can say is, who's laughing now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
As a former Morrissey fan, I can kind of find my way through this one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This registers about a mega Morrissey on the scale.
It's a thousand Morrisseys to what has just happened.
It's genuinely very bad.
For some record for how well Kanye fans have been taking this, Kanye West has three subreddits on Reddit.
There is one which is called rkanye, which was known for just derailing into very shitty posting and was in the top 1% of all Reddit forums.
There was also a second subreddit called West Sub Ever, which was where people went so they could actually have conversations because this particular original subreddit was so bad for people who think the fans in the previous two subreddits are not sufficiently deferential to the genius of the greatest artists of all time.
Which started out as a far-right subreddit, so you know it's going to be good.
Anyway, as of now, the Kanye subreddit has turned into a mixture of Taylor Swift posts and Holocaust memorial information, while West Sub Ever has been shut down by the moderators, with the last post being Kanye West on Alex Jones' show saying, I love Hitler.
So the Kanye fans are kind of bifurcated on this issue from what I understand.
I would not say the Kanye fans are particularly bifurcated on this.
I would say he has lost pretty much the majority of his fan base by this point.
There are a few people who have been So, obviously, if you're a long-term Kanye fan, you've probably got the impression that he's known for doing antics.
One of his gimmicks, I guess we can call it that now, is that he is completely convinced of his own genius and tells everyone about it constantly.
So, Fans got used to justifying strange things that he was doing by explaining, oh, he's trolling.
Oh, it's conceptual art.
Oh, you don't get it.
These people cannot actually use these justifications anymore.
And right now, I'm pretty sure the majority of attention that is on Kanye West is on people who are just waiting to see if he is going to die or get someone else killed.
It's really not a good situation.
There's a lot of people who genuinely love and care about this guy who still hope that he will come back to us, but this recent round of latent anti-Semitism has
Poisoned it so badly that I'm pretty sure there are no people left who are fans of Kanye, who are aware of what is going on, and who weren't already fascists.
And of course, with the spiral that he's in, you know, if this has a noticeable effect on his sales and stuff like that, that will just be further confirmation for him.
Because he's obviously, he's taken everything that's happened to him, the loss of revenue that's come from losing sponsorship deals and advertising and contracts for this, that and the other.
He's taken all of that as proof of what The Jews are doing to him.
They're persecuting him.
Whereas, of course, he's got it backwards.
People are divesting themselves from Kanye because his stock's going down, because he's been coming out with anti-Semitic stuff.
So I suppose, yeah, this will just feed the persecution complex.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a textbook radicalization spiral.
His brain is poisoned.
People stop hanging out with him because that's all he talks about.
Or rather, that's how it would happen if he was normal.
Instead, this is like this hugely successful celebrity.
The thing is, there was a lot of stuff that people were having to put up with from his behaviour before this as well.
You've probably seen a lot of the discussion about his old statements about loving Hitler from 2018.
There's a lot of really unacceptable behaviour that has just been going ignored.
That is all coming out now that people don't actually like him.
I've probably mentioned this on Twitter because I talk about it all the time, but my black pill theory of cancellation is that you can only get cancelled if you're not entertaining to people anymore.
Kanye has been, as you can imagine, his mental state, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder but now claims that he never had bipolar disorder and in fact it was because Jewish doctors lied to him.
The reason he believes that is because he went off his bipolar medication because he believed the bipolar medication was preventing him from accessing his artistic genius, which it may well have been doing, to be fair.
Bipolar medication is not a joke.
It is pretty difficult to be on.
He gained weight and seemed very out of it during the period when he was medicated.
Anyway, the thing is, due to his deteriorating mental state, his musical output has declined in quality as well.
Yeah, and I think this is part of the reason for the backlash against him.
He's also, and this is being incredibly cynical about it, he's hit 45, which is sort of like the expiry date for quite a lot of pop stars in general, but especially rappers who are supposed to die before they turn 30.
This is the point of No Return where pretty much every major rock star, pop star, or rapper will get a critical backlash just because they've hit the point where they're too old to be cool.
If they can then power through that, they can then enjoy a nice life as an elder statesman, and Kanye has chosen not to do that.
So I'm curious, have you listened to the leaked diss track that he has against Tim Pool, which seems to be about 20 seconds of leaked audio in which he is claiming that Jay-Z and all of his critics are being, apologies for the imagery, buttfucked by the Jews?
I have not actually heard this, no.
Apparently, it made more of an impression on the right-wing ecosystems, which I frequent, than it did to... Yes.
I'm exactly in the kind of audience that would have found something like that, but that never actually came up.
I mean, I'm in a Discord with a bunch of Kanye fans, and their reaction was that, you know, they still like his music.
They're still listening to it.
But they don't have anything positive to say about the guy anymore, and they don't seem to be following stuff like this.
And it's specifically a Discord for sharing Kanye's leaked music, so this is exactly the sort of thing.
But no, they have no interest in this anymore, because it's horrible.
Well, and so Sneako, I found out today, is hanging out with Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos and hanging out and recording in Kanye's home studio, or wherever Kanye records.
I don't know anything about that.
But yeah, this seems like Kanye seems to be, or Ye, I don't know how we want to refer to him, but Ye seems to be At least for now, and this for the long haul, if he's setting up a recording studio for Sneeko and Nick Fuentes in his little mansion there.
I have to say, my 2022 bingo card didn't have Milo and Nick Fuentes become the posse for two rappers on it.
I didn't see that one coming.
I mean, this sort of goes with my Blackpill theory of cancellation, which is that part of the appeal of Kanye, and I think people in general, when they're talking about why they like pop stars, they're not very good at separating when they're talking about why they like pop stars, they're not very good at separating out the aesthetic worth of what the pop star is actually doing from their with whom they can vicariously identify and feel part of something.
There's no harm in that because, I mean, the reason we have certain artists who we consider to be proper greats is often because of their impact on the wider world, right?
So, Kanye wasn't just great because he made good music.
He was great because he made good music and he was more important than everyone else.
So, having him hanging around with these Absolute no-talents and parasites and disgusting internet racists with nothing to... You know, this is a guy who's... Kanye's whole thing is that he was like this curatorial genius.
He would collect Creative people from all kinds of different disciplines and work with them no matter what they did.
If they did dancing, circus training, built animatronics, if they were animators, poets, singers, whatever.
He had this idea of having this kind of multidisciplinary artistic force.
So, he's going from having tracks mixed by people from Daft Punk and Compared to being a bedroom studio for a shitty racist white rapper.
It's really, really sad.
All that glamour has gone.
And so with that glamour gone, what is the appeal left?
Yeah.
We sort of briefly talked about this before, didn't we?
And we were wondering how the hookup actually happened.
And I think we decided that the most likely vector was probably Candace Owens.
Candace Owens, who Kanye has been, he was hanging around with her at a fashion show.
During which he unveiled the notorious White Lives Matter t-shirt.
The thing is, there's a lot of stuff with Kanye where you can't quite separate out whether it... This was sort of before it was clear that he'd gone completely... We've completely lost him, right?
Because the White Lives Matter t-shirt, there's a certain way that you can interpret that in the same way as the punks in the 1970s who wore swastikas because they weren't Nazis.
Kanye attempted to do damage control after the White Lives Matter t-shirt incident by posting about it on his Instagram.
a conversation that he'd had with his father, who was a former Black Panther, who said that he thought the shirts were funny.
Kanye also then tried to turn it into this sort of line about the Black Lives Matter organisation itself, who is obviously not as impossible to criticise as the actual political position in those words.
So, I think he was expecting that to save him because he'd got out of similar problems with similar issues.
In 2013, he'd been using Confederate flags on his merchandise and he explained to people that it was just because he was trying to rob the symbol of their power and people pretty much bought it because he was still being entertaining at that time.
This was, you know, you could feel things were really just turning on him.
I'm sorry, I'm just talking about this incredibly difficult sort of PR calculation that is going on when you're trying to judge the reactions of enough people to cause someone to lose their entire fan base.
But yeah, this was, you know, what I'm saying is, There did seem to be some sort of potential artistic statement being made.
The front of the t-shirts had the Pope on, and one of Kanye's catchphrases during this point was this idea of love everybody.
He nearly made an album called Love Everybody, but it ended up being thrown in his... It was during his period where he was just too mentally scrambled to be able to finish anything.
So, it's Love Everybody never actually came to fruition, but it's got a lot of sort of bipolar guy mindset in it, which is this idea of this kind of magnanimous Olympian love of everybody, Jesus, Donald Trump, Hitler, whatever.
So, a lot of that sort of mythology is resurfacing and you saw a lot of that in the interview.
It's not something that, in and of itself, is necessarily evil.
It could just be, again, like the other controversial statement he made, which was that slavery was a choice.
On the surface of that, that's just a completely reprehensible opinion.
But you could sort of twist it around, and maybe what he's saying is That we consent to our own oppression, which is a fairly sensible, you know, I'm sure there's like, Kanye is an intelligent guy.
There's probably stuff in his mind that is popping off that is making him think this is actually a profound statement.
When in fact, it's just garbage.
And, you know, it's one of the problems with bipolar, or at least the kind that Kanye seems to have.
Kanye has talked about how during his manic phases, he feels like everybody is an actor.
Everybody is out to get him.
So, he's having the sort of psychotic and schizophrenic version of bipolar mania, which ...is causing him to do the thing that people in psychosis do, which is create a complex symbolic web of everything.
They read symbolism into everything.
They develop their own personal mythology that is incoherent to everyone else, but feels like the answer to the universe to them.
That's what we're seeing now.
Yeah, so do you think that the kind of more overt Nazi, Holocaust denial stuff that he's talking about now, do you think that's because he went through whatever mechanism, made contact with Fuentes, et cetera, and now he's just kind of feeding that stuff out alongside this You know, sort of love everybody thing, which, as you say, is like very much sort of like the theme of the Alex Jones interview is like twisted as that became.
Or do you think that's something that like he kind of had in his head previously?
I am pretty sure the Holocaust denial is the result of Nick Fuentes drip feeding this to him.
There's certainly stuff that I think you can use to argue that Kanye was... So the thing is with someone's political views is that there's like, They're overt political values and there's the politics of their own personality.
I guess I can put it that way.
Kanye's personality politics were always that he was just a horrible authoritarian.
He was always extremely controlling of other people and a massive bully, so I'm sure there is a degree of emotional resonance that he feels with far-right politics that goes beyond the drip feeding from fascists that he is getting right now.
There also is, and I've got to talk carefully about this, A connection between certain strains of liberatory Black politics and anti-Semitism via Black Hebrew Israelitism.
So, it's quite possible that he encountered these ideas in a more positive and socially redeeming context, almost, I guess.
Kanye was the protégé.
I'm using that word loosely here, but he was signed by Jay-Z for Rockefeller Records.
Jay-Z is a big Louis Farrakhan guy and has him as his spiritual advisor.
Louis Farrakhan is also just a massively influential figure in hip-hop.
Pretty much every major rapper has been photographed with their arm around him, talking to him.
Kendrick Lamar has stated that he believes Black people are God's real chosen people, and that slavery was done to trial them.
Hilariously, one of the rappers who has hung out with Louis Farrakhan is Eminem, who Louis Farrakhan believes to be the descendant of a genetic experiment to produce a race of completely insane and evil superhumans.
Although, to be fair, if you were going to find a white person who would dissuade you of that, it would not be Eminem.
Jay-Z was very critically acclaimed for his album 444.
I don't know how you would say it out loud.
And that had a real centerpiece song on it, the story of OJ, and I love the song musically.
Its video is extremely powerful and upsetting, but that song also has a line in which Jay-Z says, Do you know why the Jews have all the money in America?
It's just dropped in there as if it's neutral.
There is a lot of anti-Semitism in Kanye's particular area of hip-hop, is I guess what I'm saying, but it's not overtly hateful.
A lot of these people are people who do work with Jewish producers and staff and manage to do so without completely embarrassing themselves.
I don't think Kanye would be capable of that right now.
Well, sure.
And do you think that's, I mean, there's always this kind of complicated question around, you know, like, Kanye, he's clearly, he's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
He's having issues with, clearly mental health issues, which are alongside This overt political move and these overt racist ideas.
But also, he was buddy-buddy with Donald Trump back in the day.
The idea that Kanye's going to run for president on a racist platform is not a new idea, necessarily.
He's just more extreme in the same way that the culture is more extreme.
This right-wing culture is more extreme now.
I mean, I guess as the gayologist in the room, to what degree is this a progression?
To what degree is this a PR stunt versus to what degree is this something that has some kind of legitimacy?
It's just for me, not knowing gay's history and just kind of knowing him as a cultural figure from afar, what I know him as You know, kind of a bullshit political guy kind of going off and like, I knew him as an artist.
I know him as a rapper.
I know him as, you know, married to Kim Kardashian.
I mean, I've known him for 20 years, but for me, like in terms of like what we would do on this podcast, when he put out the White Lives Matter t-shirt, I'm like, yeah, that's just Kanye doing Kanye You know, like provoke the libs bullshit.
You know, this is this is just like driving publicity.
And so to what degree is this the Alex Jones shit?
To what degree is the Tim Pool appearance?
To what degree is the Mar-a-Lago meeting with Trump?
To what degree is that just PR, in your opinion?
And to what degree is this like some kind of legitimate thing, I guess, is kind of like the question I'm asking.
Okay, so if this is PR, it certainly disproves any argument that Kanye is a genius.
Sure.
It would be impossible to imagine a less successful way of becoming a fascist president than this.
If you actually wanted to become president by stoking up the far right, and you had your wits about you, I think you would be able to do a very good job at it.
There is a kind of a zealotry of a new believer here.
Kanye's mental illness is telling him that everything that he is learning from his new Nazi friends is the key to everything that is going wrong in his life and he can't wait to share that with the world.
He thinks everyone is going to be on his side because he's such a genius.
That's very much the vibe I got from it, yeah.
Yes.
I think this is real.
As for how sincerely these beliefs are held, I don't know.
I've already said that I think there is evidence that Kanye is a bully, an authoritarian.
Even aside from the mental illness, he There's sort of an anti-intellectualism to Kanye, despite the fact that he talks about being a genius.
If you really get down what it means to be a genius, it's like this idea of don't ask where this came from.
It just all came from the air around you.
I mean, that's literally what genius means.
It's that which is present in a room, right?
He is known for bragging about the fact that he doesn't read books.
Obviously, there's a lot of people who don't read books for whatever reason, but most people who don't read books feel like they should be reading books, or are a little bit apologetic and feel that they might be stupid for not reading books.
Kanye has openly said he believes he is too intelligent to have to read books.
So, he mocks people who know things.
A lot of his humour is based on bullying people.
When he worked with T-Pain to make 808s and Heartbreak, he had everyone in the studio sing with him an insulting song about how all T-Pain's ideas were dogshit.
And T-Pain admitted later that he thought it was really fucked up, which was his words.
And he also said that he thought the SOG was pretty good and should have been on the album.
He has these awful standards for his own staff.
He forces them to dress all in black because colours and patterns annoy him.
They're not allowed to look him in the eye.
He fires them at will all the time and takes sadistic pleasure in doing so, and this is all apart from the mental illness.
There's plenty of evidence that he is just a shitty person, and that must have something to do with the fact that his shitty beliefs have struck him as being the secret truth to the universe.
But at the same time, he also has gone through a bunch of different wacky conspiracy theories in a pretty short period of time.
Kanye sent his publicist to go and harass Ruby Freeman, who was a Georgia election worker.
Because Kanye had become convinced of the Stop the Steal conspiracy and was sending this publicist to go and threaten her into admitting her corruption or else Kanye would have goons to go and kill her as the unspoken threat.
Because both of you do not know anything about Kanye and you're probably thinking of a bunch of stereotypes of rappers, Kanye is not A rapper who has a street connection.
In fact, one of his main barriers to getting taken seriously as a rapper was the fact that he was from what I would consider to be a stable working class background, but what is generally referred to when people talk about this as a middle class background.
His mother was an educated woman.
His mother, Donda, who She has lent her name to Kanye's enormous branding empire.
He sort of sanctified her after her death, but in life she was an educated woman.
She was a college professor and very loved by her students.
She was raising him in a single-parent household, and she was able to do things like buy him music equipment and things, but he wasn't exactly affluent.
However, compared to the rappers of the mid-2000s, he was Enjoying unimaginable luxury.
He was dealing with a lot of people who genuinely couldn't even hope to be working class.
People who were forced into violence.
The biggest rapper around the time that Kanye emerged was 50 Cent, who Of course, you know, his mother died in a drug war when he was a kid.
He was shot multiple times.
He really had nothing except his own ability to do crime as a way to survive.
So, Kanye also comes from a position of relative privilege within his own scene.
He's not the sort of person who would have a lot of gang members who would be able to murder someone on his behalf.
There is a class element to Kanye's fandom, which I think is worth talking about here, which is that to a certain level, Kanye's real achievement was that he was able to gentrify hip-hop.
He has enough middle-class pretensions that he was able to sell to middle-class people this idea of hip-hop as art music Despite the fact that there was nothing he was doing that was specifically more artistic than anyone else, because art doesn't work that way.
Highbrow and lowbrow are fake, but there are certain sorts of pretensions that you expect to see from middle class art.
Kanye was able to do that.
He was Part of this thing was that in the early 90s, SoundScan was brought in, which was a system for analyzing exactly which CDs were bought by exactly which consumers.
Before then, when we tried to figure out what was in the charts, Retailers would send their own handwritten or whatever lists of what they thought was selling the most, and that is how it would be worked out.
But after SoundScan, it revealed that lots more people were buying hip-hop than before.
What they also found was that Dr. Dre's gangster rap album, The Chronic, was being bought by 60% white people.
And so there became this kind of idea in the record industry that white consumers were specifically buying gang violence and this fantasy of a life in an underclass, you know?
And so all of the acts that A&Rs were backing, all of the money started flowing into rappers who were making this kind of music.
But the truth was, that was always an illusion.
The reason that statistic What actually came about was because the record stores that got SoundScan were those in heavily white areas.
It was actually true that more black consumers than average were buying gangsta rap records.
White kids were, of course, going along with it because that was what was being sold to them.
But a lot of them wanted something that they could actually relate to specifically, you know?
And then, of course, a couple of years before Kanye comes along, you get Eminem coming along.
But he had a weird act that nobody has really been able to replicate since.
He had a much younger fan base than Kanye does, and he was marketed more to children.
And also, the other thing with Eminem is that he also was from a very difficult working class background, although his skin colour insulated him from gangs.
Kanye was like I truly believe that much of the reason why he enjoyed the specific success he did was because his life was actually more relatable to suburban white kids because he was rapping about a good working class life.
When Eminem was rapping about a working-class upbringing, he was rapping about getting poisoned by his mother and not knowing where his next meal was coming from and not having clothes.
When Kanye raps about his working-class life, he's rapping about having food on the table and not knowing if you want to go to college or not and thinking that maybe you should stay and work a part-time job.
And so he was able to prove that you could actually sell preposterous amounts of hip-hop without needing to be a tough guy, without needing to have a gun.
Kanye winning his beef against 50 Cent, who in 2007, they had a beef going on about who could sell the most copies of their records.
50 Cent at this point had Pretty much derailed into a merchandising empire, selling this kind of cartoonified gangster lifestyle, which didn't have any of the things that gangster rap was initially about, which involved things like being traumatized, experiencing life in America as a black person under a threat from the cops.
By this point, it had pretty much turned into just hanging out at the club with big booty models.
I read one of Finney's books from around that time in which at one point he stops the narrative and has two gangstas hype his vitamin water, like in text.
Yes, exactly.
So Kanye, I mean, Kanye obviously is like a remorseless sellout, I think it's fair to say, but he was able to keep that kind of sense of classiness and bougie-ness with his branding.
Well, you know, 50 Cent, his remorseless selling out.
I mean, he puts hashtags at the end of all of his tweets of all the things that he's been paid to promote.
But that kind of selling out, the sort of like really brazen selling out is quite If you're coming from that sort of working class background, that's something to celebrate.
It shows that you're actually able to get money without having to do anything against the law, so why not shout about it?
But to Kanye, because he was just a little bit above him in social class, he was able to see that there was A degree of pretension, which is ultimately what middle class-ness is.
It's like working class, but you think you're better.
At least like cultural middle class.
Well, and there's a reason that someone like Nick Fuentes, who grew up in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago, grew up idolizing Kanye West.
Even though Nick Fuentes is a horrifying racist, he still loves that kind of music in the same way that Mike Pinovich grew up on Wu-Tang Clan growing up in the wealthy suburbs of New York City.
It's a common thing of wealthy suburbanites.
Yeah.
It's worth pointing out that Kanye West was enormously popular on 4chan, and in fact 4chan drove a lot of the fandom towards him.
People often talk about how Eminem fans are all just horrible racists, but it's pretty much naked classism because if you go on 4chan and talk about Eminem, they all fucking hate him.
If they don't hate him for political reasons, they hate him for musical reasons.
And that's because Eminem is almost... Obviously, he's rich as hell.
None of these people are actually working class in any way that we would understand them.
But Eminem always emphasises this idea of...
Working class identity and populism, I guess.
That just comes through in his writing without him trying to cultivate art in the same way that Kanye does.
Kanye has this idea of himself as being a high art guy.
He's put on displays in galleries of art installations and things like that.
He brands himself very much as being into high fashion.
Eminem does things like he does promos on Family Guy.
It's all very populist and very brazen and very much like things that people who are middle class look down on automatically.
And does things like having free concerts for members of the auto unions in Detroit, you know?
You can't imagine Kanye doing something like that.
Kanye, actually, to be fair, he does have this sort of idea of worker power, but it's worth pointing out that it's just a really confused version of it.
He talks a lot about how he wants to make the things he sells accessible for people, and this is in fact one of his latest things.
He sells his fashion items for $20.
And it's this idea of everyone can afford this high fashion, which is kind of cool.
I don't have a problem with that, except for the fact he was doing stuff like offloading his White Lives Matter t-shirts to homeless people because he couldn't find anyone who wanted to wear them.
Also, one of his schemes recently was that he wanted to make sure artists got control of their master recordings, or so he said.
But Big Sean, who was one of the people signed to Kanye's label, Good Music, actually said, I really wish he would do that because it would be really helpful to me.
But Kanye never actually gave back anyone control over their masters.
I sort of believe he genuinely intended to, but because his mind is in a state that it's in, he was too disorganized to do anything about it.
Which is one of the reasons I'm not actually overly worried about him becoming president.
I don't think he is coherent enough.
He can't work with people.
He can't have a conversation.
You can't imagine him being on a debate and not talking over the other person.
His ability to interact with other human beings is not enough.
For him to hold a campaign.
Well, aside from all the other systematic reasons why he will never either gain the Republican nomination or run a successful third party candidacy.
I mean, just the votes aren't there just fundamentally for someone in his position.
And this is a very different thing than Trump who had, you know, years of being on The Apprentice and like a 30 year history of being this sort of like scion of like the rich and famous, whereas like Ye is much more like as wealthy as he is and as powerful and as popular as he is, he doesn't speak to that Republican base in the same way.
And so there's just no kind of inbuilt voter.
Who's going to sit there and vote for Ye as opposed to either Trump or DeSantis, ultimately?
The people who would vote for Ye would be 4chan kiddies, a few 5%-er weirdos, and just the full-on neo-Nazis, basically.
And a few music fans who have just not looked at the internet.
It's the Andrew Yang constituency, you know?
For a lot of them, you know, because he's saying a lot of stuff a lot of them probably agree with, but he's still who he is.
Yeah, I'm sure he won't.
I'm sure he wouldn't win.
But it's, you know, it does feel a little bit like tempting fate, especially now after Trump has fought and won a successful election campaign, you know, because a lot of what you've been saying actually reminds me powerfully of Trump.
And they are quite similar in many ways, you know, rambling, incoherent, you know, coming out with regurgitating half-remembered bits and bobs of stuff they were told by the last person they were talking to, etc, etc.
Pampered, rich, nobody ever says no to them, authoritarian personality, etc, etc.
That's all true, yes.
Kim Kardashian, for what it's worth, who was Kanye's wife until recently, She claimed on Jimmy Kimmel that Kanye just doesn't know anything about politics, and the reason he attached himself to Trump was because he liked Trump because he was rich.
I think he felt that they were kindred spirits because they were both these sort of Big overbearing authoritarians again.
Kanye though, I think the big difference between him and Trump, and this is like getting into armchair psychology of famous people who I don't actually know.
Trump, I don't think has any kind of true belief in anything.
He's just like, he doesn't think, not that he can't, he just doesn't.
I'm not totally sure he's conscious, whereas Kanye, Kanye is like a true believer of whatever it is he currently feels.
Yeah, I very much agree.
He wants to save the world, and he believes that he can do that by being Kanye, so we're all stuck with it forever.
Unless he just sort of fades out of the public eye based on doing the Netanyahu bit, which was the dumbest bit.
It was the worst thing I've ever seen.
I'm going to say it was the worst thing I've ever seen, because I've seen some shit, but it was probably the cringiest thing I've ever seen.
It was, yeah, I say forever.
I think it's probably worth pointing out.
Manic phases are not indefinite.
Eventually this is going to run out of steam and I'm not 100% sure he will survive the crash that comes after this because I was telling Jack about this the other night.
If you look at it realistically, Kanye's lost everything.
He's going to snap out of this and realize that he's lost his wife.
He's lost access to his beloved children, who are awesome and don't deserve this.
He's lost his billionaire status.
He's lost his reputation.
He's lost all the things that matter to him.
He's even lost his style.
I can't imagine Kanye, someone who takes Stylishness so seriously appearing with Alex Jones and nerd Nick Fuentes and just these total ugly losers who dress horribly and have shitty looking channels.
It's completely the opposite of everything he's cultivated and everything that matters to him as an aesthete.
Also, losing billions of dollars.
It clearly bothers him.
It clearly bothers him.
But he has the mania to power his way through it.
When that mania goes, and it is going to have to go because bipolar has another pole, what can he even do?
He's going to be in the darkest depression of his life with none of his support network except these fascists.
From everything we know about Nick Fuentes, he has a very good bedside manner, by which I mean he will do a blacklight over Kanye's pillow to make sure he's not been masturbating.
Actually, yeah, this is important.
One of Kanye's recent things is his obsession with sex addiction.
And pornography came up several times.
Oh yeah, yeah.
We got a direct version of the old, you know, the Jews are flooding society with pornography conspiracy theory.
Obviously, again, coming from Fuentes.
So I'm sure we all know that sex addiction possibly isn't even real, and for the most part it's to do with the level of guilt that people experience when they look at porn.
Kanye always experienced guilt looking at porn and always Looked at a lot of porn.
He presented the Pornhub Awards at one point in the documentary he did on Netflix recently, Genius, which you should watch.
It's a slow watch, but an enlightening one.
There is a scene where he just buys a porn magazine from a stand and says, I've got a dark habit.
I've got an evil addiction.
I'm going into the dark and distant place of jerking off in the bathroom.
No one can understand my pain, clearly.
Loads of rappers love porn.
There's nothing to really be ashamed of.
Most of them do music videos that are porn videos.
That's a thing, yeah.
Even I know that.
Yeah, but Kanye always had a level of shame around the way he used sexuality in his work as well.
I mean, you've probably seen the cover of my beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which has this crude painting of Kanye having sex with this sort of weird monster lady.
He had a music video where he was in bed with a bunch of photorealistic famous people, which was the controversial line about Taylor Swift that got him into trouble.
What has come out recently is this thing where he constantly forced his employees to look at porn, including porn of Kim.
He became obsessed with Kim After watching the porn video that was, I believe, leaked against Kim's knowledge of her having sex with Ray J, and Kanye is now friends with Ray J, which he
He was forcing people to look at porn in order to make what he was considering artistic points about how much he wanted to fuck his shoes.
It was just bullying and harassment.
I don't think there's any evidence that he directly sexually harassed anybody.
But anyway, around the time that he went off his medication and went on to God, he came up with this idea that God was helping him break his sex addiction.
He made a religious album called Jesus is King, which is actually a pretty entertaining listen, in which he made sure that his collaborators weren't allowed to swear or have extramarital sex while they were on it.
And so, it's not surprising to me that this sort of anti-pornography thing has become a major part of his deranged beliefs right now.
This idea that Jewish people are sowing things with pornography.
Because one of his big anxieties before he went into full over antisemitism was the Kardashians' connection with porn.
He has this paranoid idea that the Kardashians are going to use his children in porn.
Which, if you think about it, isn't actually completely irrational.
Rather infamously, the Kardashians are selling sex, even if it's not explicit sex all the time.
The young members of the family are groomed to be sexually attractive before they are legal.
They get plastic surgery before they are old enough to consent to it.
You know, they pose nude very young.
Kanye's kids already wear makeup and do provocative poses in Instagram shots.
It's not a completely nonsensical belief for him to worry that the Kardashians would be doing soft prostitution of his kids when they come of age.
Obviously, everything else is nonsense.
Yeah, the other big story, I mean, I do want to ask you this just to just sort of, you know, thinking that you might have some insight here.
The other big story and that's one of the right wing media is the Balenciaga, you know, Kitty BDSM story, which is mostly nonsense, but you know, and Ye kind of came out like very openly like, no, Balenciaga is fine.
And I'm wondering if you think, is that Ye just sort of going, well, they're one of the few brands still support, I don't even know what the status of his relationship with them is, but is this like a purely financial thing?
Because it seems to me that that would be a clear moment of him leaning into this kind of right-wing discourse.
And I don't know, do you have a take on that?
Because that's the thing that like, A lot of people on the far right are criticizing him for like the ones who aren't like, go for the Jews.
It's like, but also like, you know, groomers, you know, so what's your.
I mean, Kanye still very much loves Kim, and Kim is being sponsored by Balenciaga.
I think he was just trying to protect her.
Balenciaga also helped him out with the Yeezy Gap collaboration, which is now discontinued.
So, I don't think Balenciaga is still going to be working with him for obvious reasons.
But it may well be that they haven't personally kicked him out of the door just yet.
We do know Adidas has very firmly booted him and there's in fact a very sad and depressing video of Kanye showing up at the Skechers head office and begging them to take his shoes and being asked to leave.
So, I mean, I don't know if relationships between him and Balenciaga are that frosty yet.
He's definitely very distrustful of the high fashion world in that he's accused Adidas of, he's accused the Louis Vuitton Corporation of deliberately murdering Virgil Abloh by stressing him out and stuff.
Virgil Abloh is a fashion designer who died tragically young from cancer.
He was a best friend of Kanye, and Kanye has taken up his death as one of the many reasons to hate the Jews.
He also believes the Jews murdered Michael Jackson, who is Kanye's favorite pop star.
Which speaks volumes, you know?
That came up in the Tim Pool interview, didn't it?
Where they were talking about, well, you know, they'll Britney Spears you, or worse than that, they'll Michael Jackson you.
The clear indication being that they'll kill you.
They will kill you like they killed Michael Jackson.
Kanye West has claimed that the Kardashians attempted to put him under a conservatorship.
Obviously, he's not a very reliable narrator, but I don't think this is impossible.
Yeah, no, I mean, the Kardashians are very clear.
I mean, look, we don't have to, like, pick a good side and bad side of, like, Ye versus the Kardashians at this point.
They can both be terrible in different ways.
And it would not surprise me in the slightest to say, like, yeah, the Kardashians are like a family of fucking lawyers.
They have billions of dollars and this went like, yeah, this guy is kind of a problem for us.
And if we can just like get him, you know, get him under, get a mental health professional to sign off on this, we can control all of his, all of his output for the next 10 or 20 years.
Like that, that makes perfect sense to me, especially given the Kardashian empire, you know?
And of course, like that sort of thing, you know, not to, you know, sometimes you don't have to hand it to them is the, is the motto of the podcast or one of them, but you know, it would make sense that if, that if you're Kanye and you go through that experience, then like kind of saying like, everyone's out to get me, well, yeah, my wife and her family may have literally tried to put me under a conservatorship.
That's a sign that the people closest to you are out to get you.
And of course, when you're at that level of fame, you're not just a person doing a job and having a life, you are a support system for hundreds if not thousands of people at some point.
And all of these people, anyone that's close to you, is Ultimately suspect of wanting your fortune, of wanting a piece of that action.
So, again, Kanye became famous.
I mean, he's 45 now and he's been famous for 23 years or so.
I don't know when his first album came out.
He first became super famous around 2004, but he was working before then as a music producer.
So, hip hop heads knew who he was before then.
He's been in the industry since he's 20, like 22 or something, you know, basically.
So yeah, that doesn't, I mean, none of this is, none of this is shocking if you sort of like put yourself in that place.
I think that it's, you know, like, Yeah, this fascinates me because I've been tracking the right-wing response to gay and to what's going on without really knowing a lot of gay's context.
And it does seem like, and again, not to defend him in any sense of what he's been saying, because what he's been saying is indefensible, obviously.
But hearing your story of his background, it does give me a a greater context in terms of understanding where he is as opposed to how he's being used.
I, for one, definitely appreciate that, and I hope our listeners do as well.
Thank you.
Holly, please tell us, not to cut you off, but is there anything else that you think that we should know about this context here that you would like the audience to necessarily know, or any kind of closing thoughts?
I suppose this was like a little elaboration of the last point with Kanye being worried about his relationship with the Kardashian.
I have to talk carefully about this one because I'm white as hell, but there is something about Kanye's own internalized racism and the way that it It sort of crosses with this sort of black radicalism that he was raised with in a really confusing way in that he
He resents the Kardashians for being a white family that are trying to control his black kids.
And that was one of the reasons why the I do.
The conservatorship freaked him out because he felt like he was going to be owned like a literal slave.
And Obviously, that is a really difficult dynamic.
Everyone knows the Kardashians are pretty infamous for using Black culture and Black aesthetics in order to boost their cultural credibility.
I think the cynics' view of this is that Kanye was sort of the dual in that crown.
He was capturing a legitimate Black rapper who was seen as an artist and bringing him into the fold was the turning point from which the Kardashians became these rather trashy, mockable Paris Hilton type reality figures into being seen as legitimate icons and business people.
Kim has done things like dress up Kanye's kids as legendary black music artists like Snoop Dogg and Eazy-E.
She was well known for having dated mostly black men in the past.
This is another thing that has massively freaked out Kanye is the fact that she then dated a white Jewish guy.
A white Jewish guy who supposedly is known for having a gigantic penis.
And in fact, he supposedly had a meltdown on a telephone call saying, "My wife is getting dicked by a white boy with a 12 inch cock and you've got to help me." There's a really delicate racial dynamic here, which I'm not even able to begin unpacking.
We don't begin to unpack that stuff on IBSG.
That's just not where we go here.
We've got other fish to fry for obvious reasons.
It seems to me like his antisemitism is a way for him to rationalize having a group of white people who he can feel are below him on the race ladder, I guess, but at the same time above him.
It's really confusing.
I don't understand it.
He's not very sane.
None of this makes any sense.
Yeah, no, I agree.
He's fallen in a pit of snakes.
Yeah, like none of this would have happened.
I mean, he would have ended up believing a bunch of incredibly wacky stuff, but it might have been some more useful wacky stuff if he was surrounded by some other people and if he wasn't just like a horrible bully.
He spent his time, you know, he's pretty much alienated himself from everyone who ever believed in him or loved him at this point, apart from his own father.
He has one of his best friends, or I want to call them friends.
They've had an on and off relationship, usually because Kanye would do something stupid.
But Kid Cudi, who is one of his best collaborators, he co-wrote 808s and Heartbreak with him.
And he co-wrote Kid C. Ghost, which I think is going to be Kanye's last critically acclaimed album.
Kanye broke up with him over virtually nothing.
He broke up with him because Cudi was at a show with Billie Eilish, who had given an inhaler to a fan in the crowd.
If you can understand the logic of this.
No, you're not going to understand the logic of this because neither of you know anything about pop music.
But basically, the logic of this was that by looking after a fan in the crowd, Billie Eilish was dissing Travis Scott, who has had an infamous, horrible crowd crash at one of his shows recently.
And Kanye was siding with Travis by cutting one of his best friends completely out of his life.
Like, that's the level we're dealing with right now.
That's why Kanye is being surrounded by these absolute snakes and charlatans.
I mean, these are like the lowest rent Nazis going.
Milo Yiannopoulos was disgraced even among Nazis because of The pedophilia thing.
Nick Fuentes is just like a nerd and a grifter trying to get attention.
Alex Jones was disgraced by the Sandy Hook thing and is only really talking to very confused old people.
And Tim Pool is just a dipshit, a non-entity.
These are not even good Nazis.
Kanye West's good Nazi was Donald Trump, and even Donald Trump openly hates him now.
There's nothing left except just going lower and lower, further down into the bottom of the barrel.
Nick Fuentes is having the worst fanboy time of his life.
Nick Fentes is having a great time, the rest of us aren't.
This is not going to end well for Kanye West.
He is spreading a lot of genuinely dangerous hatred and a lot of far-right agitators are using his name as a shield to spread hate.
Probably there will be violence that has been agitated by what we are seeing right now, and I can't see any way out for him except the manic phase wearing off, at which point he's then presented with an immediate host of arguably worse problems, you know?
So, this isn't good.
It's very, very bad.
Sorry, that was a terrible way to end it.
No, I think that's perfect.
That's a very adult-speak-German way to end it, honestly.
You fell into the pattern, ultimately.
Ended on the saddest thing you could possibly think of.
This isn't good.
This isn't good.
Thank you, Holly, for coming on and giving us this context, because I think it's not something I would have ever been able to produce.
And, you know, we really appreciate it.
So tell the audience where they can find your work on the internet and what you might be working on that might Be relevant to these topics.
I'm not going to put my Twitter handle on this podcast.
Nazis listen to this.
And not as many as used to.
Although they're back on Twitter now.
So yeah, that's probably that's probably fair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can probably find me with like a bare minimum amount of Googling, but I'm not going to shout out my handle here.
Thank you.
Well, fair enough.
Well, listeners, if you've enjoyed listening to Holly explain Kanye West to me, then you might enjoy the five-part multi-hour podcast that Holly and I did a couple of years ago, where she explained Final Fantasy VII to me, which you will find on my podcast feed over at PexLives.
So yeah, thanks, Holly, for coming on.
That's absolutely brilliant.
And thanks, listeners, for sticking with us.
And yeah, we will be back to you with more of this.
Very soon, very soon.
We have a lot of episodes planned, so for sure.
Thank you very much for having me.
Of course, of course.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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