Adidas cut ties with him. His star agency let him go. Ye, the singer formerly known as Kanye West, was seen by thousands of people in a Long Island venue on Friday night. These people had not turned their backs on him.
Ye recently released “Vultures 1,” his first album since a series of antisemitic comments that cost him business deals and were widely criticized. At a listening party at UBS Arena, he talked about his new project with R&B singer Ty Dolla Sign, which included lyrics that didn’t skirt around the controversy. This was another test of the limits of his fan base.
Ye raps in “King,” the last song on the album, “‘Crаzy, bipolar, antisemite,’ and I’m still the king.” The song got a small row of cheers.
It looked like Ty Dolla Sign and Ye showed up on a smoke-filled stage a little before 11 p.m., but it was hard to be sure who was there. The rapper, artist, and longtime troublemaker never showed his face while he bragged about his new music, which had samples from “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer and “Yeezy’s back, all right!” by the Backstreet Boys.
“Vultures 1” was supposed to come out in December, but delays and false starts pushed the date back to early Saturday morning, soon after the hour-long listening party was over.
Ye’s behavior has been all over the place lately, and loyal fans have had to deal with the controversial things he has done, like wearing a shirt that said “White Lives Matter” to Paris Fashion Week and saying on Twitter (now X) that he would go “con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” and accusing “Jewish media” and “Jewish Zionists” of fueling a paparazzi frenzy and canceling his shows.
“I’ve had to explain myself to a lot of people,” Markus Phillips, 18, said. “Friends who listen to Taylor Swift” and “Jewish friends” are two groups who have asked him why he still likes the singer.
Phillips, who had driven down from Buffalo with his friends for the event, said, “I don’t agree with everything he does outside of music, but I still value him as a generational artist.”
A lot of the fans who paid $140 or more for the listening party were from Generation Z. Some said they weren’t bothered by Ye’s actions—”Doesn’t affect me,” an 18-year-old from New Jersey said with a shrug—but others were having a hard time connecting the artist they’ve loved since his first album, “The College Dropout,” with the one who said “I do love Һitler” on a talk show with cоnspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Do you think he really means what he’s saying, or does he just want to stir up trouble? Jack Urig, a 20-year-old waiter from New Jersey, who was wearing a purple hoodie that Ye gave him as a thank-you for giving money to his 2020 presidential campaign as a youth.
A lot of people in line before the doors opened said things like “separating the art from the artist” and made guesses about Ye’s mentаl health and behavior. (He said he was told he had bipolar illness.) Some people thought it was all a show or some kind of marketing stunt to get more attention. They pointed to his statement of apology to the Jewish community, which was posted in Hebrew and came out late last year as he was getting ready to release new music.
Ye wrote in the post, “It was not my intention to offend or demean, and I deeply regret any pаin I may have caused.” He also said, “I am committed to starting with myself and learning from this experience to ensure greater sensitivity and understanding in the future.”
The new album’s words don’t really show the same sense of regret. During the song “Stars,” he raps about having “a few Jews on the staff now.” In his song “Vultures,” which came out last year, he raps that he can’t be racist because he had with a Jewish woman. This line was one of the most popular in the arena. During the verse, the music stopped so that the crowd could shout it.
Ye is an album with gospel-infused house, R&B, and trap music. It was produced by Quavo, Playboi Carti, Chris Brown, Lil Durk, and Ye’s daughter North West, who sang on one track and attended the album’s first listening party in Chicago on Thursday. Ye’s lyrics often talk about the drаmа surrounding his image over the past few years, showing that he has come out on top despite his critics. In “Bur𝚗,” he raps, “I burned eight billiоn to take off my chains.”
Many fans at the arena on Friday said it was hard to separate Ye from the music that reminded them of their childhoods and from their clothes.
Mahatub Ahmed, 27, wore Yeezy shoes to the show and said, “What do they want me to do? I have 11 more pairs at home.” Get rid of them and bur𝚗 them!” His family and friends have asked him why he doesn’t change the nаmes of his social media accounts that play on “Yeezus,” the nаme of the rapper’s sixth solo record, but he doesn’t want to change them.
Shareef Rashid, 47, went with his 13-year-old son Jair, who is a much younger fan. His bond with Ye is mostly based on the past. The first record that drew him to Ye was “Graduation,” which came out in 2007. It had creative soul sounds and songs that spoke to him as a young, middle-class Black guy about the same age as Ye.
Rashid, who is a rapper in his spare time, recently shared a short song clip in which he raps about Kanye West: “Put America on blast with everything you sаy/Now you just talk because and it don’t feel the same way/I hope you are OK.”
There will always be a group of Ye’s fans for whom the math is much easier: they will support him no matter what he says or does.
As Kiara Fuller, 23, waited in line to buy merchandise, she asked out loud if the person behind the mask onstage that night would really be Ye. She is a huge Ye fan.
“On the way here, I thought, wouldn’t it be the funniest prank if it wasn’t even him going out there and some random person did it?” She told a group of her friends.
After going past the edges of Queens and waiting hours for a difficult choice, wouldn’t this be the last thing that should be done?
“Eh,” Fuller said with a shrug, “got to see it through.”