The antisemitic outbursts and provocations by the artist now known as Ye have raised questions about how much offensive behaviour companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.
Kanye West had already been burning bridges in the music industry. He was disinvited from performing at the Grammy Awards last spring after erratic behaviour. He withdrew from headlining this year’s Coachella festival just over a week before it began. His last album was released not on streaming services, but exclusively on a proprietary US$200 ($345) speaker device.
This month West, who now goes by Ye, came under fire for making a series of antisemitic remarks and wearing a shirt with a slogan associated with white supremacists, putting some of his fashion-related businesses — which appear to be more lucrative these days than his musical ventures — in jeopardy.
It has become a make-or-break moment for his career, and raised questions about how much offensive behaviour companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.
Adidas, the German sneaker giant whose collaboration with Ye’s company, Yeezy, has been estimated to be worth billions, had earlier this week said that their partnership was “under review” — prompting the Anti-Defamation League to ask, “What more do you need to review?” On Tuesday the company announced it was cutting ties with Ye ending their nearly decade-long partnership. Ye ended his Yeezy Gap partnership last month, before the latest controversies erupted, but in recent days Gap sent out promotional emails for the Yeezy Gap hoodie.
There have been some signs that the fashion industry is distancing itself from Ye, as the former halo effect of his celebrity turned into an Achilles’ heel after he appeared at Paris Fashion Week earlier this month in a shirt that read “White Lives Matter,” and then went on to make antisemitic remarks on social media and in a series of interviews, posting on Twitter that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”
Balenciaga, whose fashion show Ye opened in Paris this month with a surprise modelling appearance, deleted him from its pictures and videos of the show. Similar images disappeared from Vogue Runway, the platform of record for fashion shows. And Skims, the shapewear brand started by Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, that he reportedly helped shape in design and aesthetic, described him as a “small minority shareholder” and said that he had “no active role at Skims.”
And Kardashian condemned “hate speech” in a post on Twitter on Monday, which named no one but said: “I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end.”
Designer Willy Chavarria, who last worked with Ye in 2020 on Yeezy Gap, said in an email, “I think it’s important for brands that use Ye for their gain like Balenciaga and Adidas to be forthcoming on their position on hate speech.”
Ye has weathered crises before, especially since 2016, when he was hospitalised; he later said he had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In recent years he has been condemned for saying that Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves” and that centuries of slavery had been “a choice”; polarised fans with his embrace of right-wing politics and former President Donald Trump; launched a quixotic campaign for president in 2020; and split with Kardashian. He has continued to work amid it all.
Much of the music industry, where an artist’s notoriety is often a key selling point, has appeared to take more of a wait-and-see attitude about his latest controversies.
But there is uncertainty about his musical future, too. Ye is no longer represented by the Creative Artists Agency, one of the world’s major booking agencies, a representative of the company said. On Monday, the film and television studio MRC announced that it was shelving a completed documentary about Ye following his antisemitic outbursts. He is no longer signed to Def Jam, his longtime record company; his contract expired with his 2021 album, Donda. And Ye’s own label, G.O.O.D. Music, which has released music by other artists like the rapper Pusha T, is also no longer affiliated with Def Jam, according to a person briefed on the deals. A representative of Def Jam declined to comment, and Ye did not respond to questions sent to a representative.
“Will Kanye bounce back from this?” asked Randy Phillips, who was the promoter for a benefit concert Ye performed with Drake last December at the LA Memorial Coliseum that drew more than 60,000 fans and was streamed live by Amazon. “He could. He’s a musical genius. But it’s going to take time. It’s not going to be immediate.”
A high note, then a fall
In 2016, as he performed on a spaceshiplike platform that hovered over sold-out arena crowds during his Saint Pablo Tour, Ye appeared to be at the peak of his creative powers.
His seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo, was his latest No. 1 hit and his show was received as an event. He was moving full-steam into the fashion world. His marriage to Kardashian, a reality-TV princess, had made him even more famous.
But Ye never finished the tour.
Shortly after he delivered a long, grievance-filled monologue at a concert in Sacramento, California, that November, and abruptly ended the show after just a few songs, Ye was hospitalised, and the remainder of the tour was cancelled.
In some ways Ye’s music career has never quite recovered. In the six years since, his only performances have been scattered dates, with no proper tour befitting a major star. Once a frequent presence at the top of the Billboard charts, Ye has not had a huge hit in years. While his recent albums have usually opened at No. 1, they have then slid down the charts and been overshadowed by other releases.
His career since has toggled between increasingly outrageous public controversies and sometimes remarkable creative achievements.
On his 2021 album, Donda, he included industry pariahs like Marilyn Manson, who had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, and DaBaby, who had made homophobic remarks and waffled about apologies. He made attacks on comedian Pete Davidson, who was dating Kardashian, including in a music video in which an animated figure closely resembling Davidson is kidnapped and buried.
Yet Ye’s Sunday Service performances — intimate, spiritual events including one at the Coachella festival in 2019 — mesmerised audiences. And his earlier period remains so popular that his catalogue has held strong on streaming services, with more than 90 million streams a week in the United States over the past month, and a total of nearly 4 billion streams so far this year, according to the tracking service Luminate. His audience on the radio, on the other hand, has fallen by about 22 per cent over the past month, as some stations have cut back on playing his songs.
Fashion ventures at risk
As his music career has stumbled, Ye’s work in fashion has taken on new importance. The most lucrative corner of his empire appears to be Yeezy’s partnership with Adidas, which began in 2013 after he left a collaboration with Nike. The Adidas deal, which involved both shoes and clothing, became hugely successful.
Even before his recent controversies, Ye had been sparring publicly with Adidas executives. There was increasing pressure on the company in recent days to take action. On Sunday, after a group hung a banner reading “Kanye is right about the Jews” over a Los Angeles freeway, Jeffrey I. Abrams, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director there, released a statement that concluded, “Decisive action against antisemitism by Adidas is long overdue.” The company announced Tuesday that their partnership was over.
The partnership had put Adidas in a difficult position. Its founder, Adi Dassler, belonged to the Nazi Party, and in Germany, where antisemitic statements made online can lead to prosecution, companies that played a role in the country’s dark history are often expected to uphold their responsibility to prevent the return of such sentiment.
Ye has long been interested in fashion. In 2009, he interned at Fendi with Virgil Abloh, who went on to work with Ye’s Donda creative agency before starting his own brand. That year Ye also brought a group of collaborators and friends to “crash” Paris Fashion Week.
A luxury debut (DW by Kanye West) at Paris Fashion Week in 2011 was critically savaged and lasted only two seasons, but his partnership with Adidas proved transformative. The company underwrote his clothing brand, Yeezy, which unveiled its first collection at New York Fashion Week in 2015, with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna and Diddy sitting in the front row.
Within a few seasons Ye packed Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people for a fashion show and album premiere. While his Season 4 show on Roosevelt Island in September 2016 proved a debacle, his potent combination of reality-TV celebrity, music stardom, sneaker success and establishment disruption was impossible to resist for an industry that often felt stuck in the last century.
It is also why partnering with Yeezy was so appealing to Gap, the mall brand whose sales and cultural relevance were floundering. Gap hoped the partnership, announced in 2020, would last 10 years and generate US$1 billion in annual sales.
Instead it lasted about two years, and produced only two products until a third party — Balenciaga — was brought in to accelerate the line. Lawyers for Ye argued that Gap broke “contractual obligations.” Gap said it was “deciding to wind down the partnership.” Ye has suggested that he may open his own line of retail shops.
Last month, Ye went to Paris. He modelled for Balenciaga, and held his own show, where he proved he could still draw top industry names — including Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful and designer John Galliano, who attended, and model Naomi Campbell, who walked in the show.
Before the event began, Ye offered what turned out to be a preview of what was to come: “You can’t manage me,” he told the crowd. “This is an unmanageable situation.”
He made good on his promise.
An embrace of the right
With Ye in Paris, photographed in her own “White Lives Matter” shirt, was Candace Owens, a conservative activist and media personality who shares his love for the spotlight and taste for provocation.
Ye has embraced conservative politics since 2016, when he announced his support for Trump, meeting him at Trump Tower while he was president-elect and later in the Oval Office when he was president.
For several years he has associated with Owens, a fellow Trump supporter who has become one of the country’s most prominent Black critics of the Black Lives Matter movement. In April 2018, Ye tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” Owens accompanied him to an interview with TMZ Live the following month in which he called American slavery a “choice,” spurring outrage.
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years?” he said. “That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? We’re mentally in prison.”
This month Owens posted on Twitter that Ye had been “officially kicked out of JP Morgan Chase bank,” which she described as “frightening.” In fact, Ye had decided to leave the bank, and he announced his intention to do so in September on CNBC.
Ye attended the October 12 premiere in Nashville, Tennessee, of Owens’ documentary The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM. Ye then went on the podcast Drink Champs and questioned the official account of Floyd’s death, for which a police officer was convicted of murder. His remarks prompted outrage from the Floyd family and an apology from the show’s host, N.O.R.E.
After Twitter and Instagram restricted Ye’s accounts this month in response to antisemitic posts, the social media platform Parler, which bills itself as a platform for uncancelable free speech, announced that it would be sold to Ye. Its chief executive, George Farmer, is Owens’ husband.
Mental health struggles
Ye’s recent antisemitic outbursts and other provocations have prompted some in the music industry to wonder whether his behaviour was related to his mental health struggles.
Ye has long alluded to mental health issues in lyrics — as early as 2005, in Gossip Files, he raps, “They told my mama I was bipolar, had ADD” — but his psychiatric treatment did not become part of the public record until 2016, when he was hospitalised.
He has acknowledged a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but at times, including during his 2018 meeting with Trump, questioned it and said that his problem might have been sleep deprivation. He told David Letterman the following year that he had been “hyper-paranoid” when he was hospitalised, convinced that people wanted to kill him.
He continued to address mental illness over the years in interviews, on social media and in his work, often expressing reluctance to take psychiatric medications. In 2018 he tweeted, “6 months off meds I can feel me again.”
During the summer of 2020, when he was often disjointed, emotional and meandering on social media and in public appearances, Kardashian, who was still married to him, issued a statement on Instagram asking for “compassion and empathy” as he managed his symptoms, suggesting his family had tried and failed to get him into treatment.
For a person with bipolar disorder, a manic episode is “a very sped-up state,” said David Miklowitz, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide. “They’re full of ideas, sometimes ideas that get grandiose and delusionally unrealistic.”
It can be difficult for friends and family to disentangle whether a person in a manic episode is delusional, or expressing their true beliefs.
Rwenshaun Miller, 35, a psychotherapist who has bipolar disorder, said he regretted that Ye “doesn’t have someone around to take his phone” and ensure that he receives treatment. But he said the rapper should be forced to reckon with the consequences of his behaviour. “I know it can make you do certain things, but it is also up to me to take accountability for things that happen when I am in a manic episode,” he said.
Muted response, so far
While people in the entertainment industry, including many who have worked with Ye in the past, privately express shock about his recent comments, few have spoken publicly.
But the heads of two major talent agencies that do not represent Ye have called for people to stop working with him. Ari Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor, the parent company of the agency WME, wrote an opinion article for The Financial Times calling on entertainment companies — including Spotify, Apple and “whoever organises West’s tours” — to cease working with Ye.
Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency, wrote in an internal email that “we’re seeing a surge in antisemitism in our communities, fuelled by Kanye’s comments” and urged a boycott.
Representatives of Spotify and Apple did not respond to requests for comment. Universal Music Group, the parent of Def Jam, and AEG Presents, the global concert company that puts on Coachella, declined to comment.
Some of the industry’s silence may be strategic, as key players wait to see if Ye — still widely considered an immensely talented musician with a gift for seizing attention — will express contrition and begin a comeback cycle. A successful one could be lucrative for any partner.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ben Sisario, Vanessa Friedman, Jessica Testa and Ellen Barry
Photographs by: Nina Westervelt, A J Mast, Gabriella Demczuk and Rozette Rago
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES