Tag: Kanye West

Kanye West’s bizarre ‘campaign rally,’ explained

Kanye West says he is running for president, and he launched his campaign with a bizarre, uncomfortable rally.

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Kanye West held his first campaign rally for his (maybe serious) run for the United States presidency this week. It quickly went off the rails, and arguably had more people worried about his mental health than seriously considering him as a candidate for the highest office in the land.

It was bombastic, strange, and very Kanye, in the worst sort of way. If you’re just coming into this story, you probably have a lot of questions. We will try to answer them here.

Who is this now?

Kanye West, the producer and rapper who’s made some of the best music of the last few decades by, like, anyone. We ranked all of his songs a few years back. He’s got really good songs!

Why is he holding a campaign rally?

West says he’s running for president.

Like, the actual president?

Yes.

Oh.

Yeah.

What are his … politics?

They’re a bit all over the place, as you might imagine. West has gone from famously decrying George W. Bush for not caring about Black people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to being a pretty vocal supporter of Donald Trump. He’s now saying he’s his own man.

As to his specific policies, uh, honestly I feel a bit gross getting into them, because it’s clear this man is going through something right now, or just using a platform to drum up interest in his new album.

But to give you a taste: “Harriet Tubman actually never freed the slaves, she just had the slaves go work for other white people” is a thing he said, along with suggesting marijuana should be free, and that there should be no more Plan B contraceptive, instead Plan A, which apparently is a plan to give every person who has a child $1 million. (Not a bad idea, tbh.)

So what was this rally?

It was him kicking off his presidential campaign. He wore a bulletproof vest and talked for a while, to some cheers and a whole lot of boos. It appeared most of the people there were there to gawk at the stunt as opposed to, you know, support him for president.

So is this all just a stunt?

Most likely. West announced he was running for president a few weeks ago, but then a spokesperson said he wasn’t running due to not getting organized enough to get on the ballot in a lot of states.

Then West said he was running again. So, I have no idea.

He has a new album coming out?

Yes. He’s sworn this isn’t just a publicity stunt for the new album, but, you know, he also said that marijuana should be free for everyone, so how seriously you take him is up to you. There are parts of this whole thing that are worrying, however.

What’s worrying about it?

West has been very vocal about his mental health issues in the past, openly discussing them in his music, and for him to now launch a presidential bid in which he’s openly getting emotional and throwing pretty out-there ideas into the world is worrying.

It suggests, to some, that this isn’t a marketing stunt, or an earnest run for president, but rather a guy with some issues who clearly isn’t being held in check or helped by the people around him. I have no idea, and can’t speculate, but it’s all kind of sad and worrying.

Could he actually influence the election?

I sincerely doubt it. Suggesting, as some on the right wing have, that Kanye West would split the Black vote and take votes away from Biden is about as disrespectful as you can be to Black voters in this country. I’d say West might steal some of the Idiot Vote from who knows who, or the “I was just going to write in Mickey Mouse” Vote, but I don’t think that’s a major part of the electorate.

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Yeezus turns seven years old today and we’re still not being honest about it

Yeezus was trash.

Look, I don’t claim to be a music journalist and I wouldn’t be bold enough to say that every musical opinion I have is correct.

In fact, if I’m honest about it, there are some pretty awful ones that I’ll die on a hill for. Will they be named here? Absolutely not. Because that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

We’re here to talk about Yeezus — Kanye West’s sixth studio album. Today is the album’s seventh anniversary and, somehow, seven years later, it is still not good. The Internet isn’t going to want to hear that, and that’s fine. But it’s not.

Good music is all about connectivity. It’s about making people feel something. It’s about a shared experience. It’s hard to find any of that in Yeezus.

Instead, what we got was an over the top manifestation of West’s infamous God complex that has continued to evolve over the years. It felt like a continuation of the grandiose concepts used in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. That album was already pretty close to perfect.

Tweak that perfection a bit, and the result you get is West screaming about his greatness at his audience over some twisted, eerie production that would otherwise be perfect if not for the lack of creativity in the content. In other words, Yeezus.

Yes, we did get some good things from this album. Bound 2 is one of the most incredible pieces of production from West. We also got an amazing SNL performance out of it.

But this album felt more like shock tactics than actual music. He was at a stage where he’d become a household name and a TMZ favorite after marrying Kim Kardashian. He wanted people to hate him again.

Everything from the title of Yeezus itself to the only listed feature (God) on I Am a God just feels like a desperate attempt to grab some attention through rebellion. It wasn’t needed.

That feels especially odd considering where he was in his career at that point. West had already broken barriers with production, rapping and excellency in MBDTF and he was coming off of one of the best collaboration albums ever with Jay-Z. He didn’t need to do any of this.

People laud the album as some sort of exploration from West — sort of in the same vein as Lil Wayne putting together a rock album (Rebirth). And maybe that’s fair. Maybe being an all-time great gets boring. Trying new things does keep the mind fresh.

But all experiments don’t go well. Sometimes they fail. In the pantheon of Kanye West albums, this one should be considered that. A failed experiment. Sure, it broke boundaries, but it didn’t move music forward. There was nothing new to really take away from it. No one thought to take this and try and move it forward — it’s still stuck in a time of its own.

Maybe that was the point for West. But if it was, it feels like a wasted moment when you consider his height at the time. No matter how you feel about this album, you know he could’ve done better.

And that’s the most disappointing part.

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Kanye West’s latest Yeezy 451 sample leaked and it’s terrible

Man, these are bad.

There’s absolutely no denying that Kanye West’s Yeezy brand is a sneaker empire right now. Outside of Michael Jordan himself, there’s no singular figure more closely associated to sneakers than West.

But, my goodness, does Kanye West make some absolutely awful sneakers at times. The latest case: A sample of the Yeezy 451 leaked on Wednesday and these things look terrible.

Honestly, these sneakers look like wet potato sacks. I’m unsure how you’re even supposed to slide them on your feet. It was like they were going for the whole “sock with a sole” look but ended up creating a… is that a dumpling?

Yup, that’s a dumpling. Tell me they don’t look like they’d go great with some soy sauce right now. You can’t. Because that’s exactly what it is. We have proof.

The only person that thinks this sample is a good idea is Kanye West. That has to be it. Everyone else is clowning them.

I wanted to give this shoe more of a chance. It is a sample, after all, so this probably won’t be the final version. And they’re not even on foot! All shoes look better on foot.

Except these. After doing two seconds of research, we have determined that these do not look any better on foot.

At this point, you can’t tell me Ye isn’t just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. This looks like something a 12 year old would create on NBA 2k or something.

But, you know what? I can’t even really blame Kanye for this. Every other Yeezy ever has sold out in seconds. This one probably won’t be any different — even if it does look like a shoe cover instead of an actual shoe.

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All-Star Sunday: The best pictures

All-Star Sunday: The best pictures

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The Cardinals announced Kyler Murray’s Rookie of the Year win with an old Kanye West album cover

Who knew the Cardinals were this cool?

Sports team social media accounts are almost always hit or miss. Either something is extremely dope or extremely corny — we respect the effort either way.

The Arizona Cardinals did something that was on the extremely dope end of the spectrum. It was announced that Kyler Murray is the NFL’s Offensive Rookie of The Year on Saturday, and the Cardinals dropped a pretty cool graphic to celebrate.

They borrowed some artwork from Kanye West’s CLASSIC (I repeat, CLASSIC) album, Graduation.

Instead of the old Kanye West bear we’re used to on the cover, it’s Murray. And instead of him flying off from college with a degree, he’s flying from the Cardinals’ stadium with a trophy in hand.

They also used the “Don’t act like we never told ya” lyric from West’s “Stronger” which made the tweet that much better.

As a fan of literally every single one of Kanye West’s old albums before 2010, I have to say this is super cool to see. I guess this would be considered a throwback now? Sheesh, we’re getting old.

Shoutout to the Cardinals for being so creative here and shoutout to Murray for winning the award — he earned it. That’s only part of the reason why I needed to write this post.

The other part was this: Yeezus was trash.

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