A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.
It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.
The bartender probably wasn’t making a political statement, but the soundtrack felt all too apt for the dawn of the great uncancelling—the sweeping return of various disgraced figures and discouraged behaviors to the public realm. Donald Trump, a convicted felon, was back in the White House and naming accused abusers, quacks, and even Mel Gibson to positions of honor. Trend forecasters were proclaiming that Trump’s reelection represented a cultural shake-up in addition to a governmental one, replacing the stiff moralism of wokeness with cowboy rowdiness and chic nihilism. Phrases such as “the boom boom aesthetic” and “dark mode” were being coined to describe the phenomenon of young people suddenly dressing like Patrick Bateman and availing themselves of the term retard.
Given this climate, I thought maybe I could loosen up and try that whole “separating the art from the artist” thing again. I’d not been boycotting Ye’s music per se, but for the past few years, the disgust caused by his conduct had ruined the pleasure of stomping around to “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” Now I could sense something shifting. The second Trump administration’s flurry of disorienting news was already becoming soul-deadening. The bad actors who were reemerging seemed only energized by outrage. Exhaustion was supplanting my sense of ick.
A few weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, the ick came roaring back. That day, a commercial aired directing viewers to Ye’s online store, which he then updated to sell only one item: a white shirt with the black, swirling symbol of the Third Reich. When I pulled up the website to see for myself, I felt a few kinds of bad feelings. There was horror at the Nazism. There was embarrassment at the fact that I’d recently wanted to listen to this guy’s voice again. And there was the sinking, instinctual understanding of what Ye was doing: testing how numb America has gotten.
The shirt stunt was part of a sudden flurry of activity suggesting a Ye comeback campaign. He crashed the Grammys; he’s prepping an album; he’s hyping a cryptocurrency. All the while, he’s doubled down on Hitler talk—and asserted his kinship with the second Trump wave. “Elon stole my Nazi swag,” he joked in one X post, referring to the tech mogul’s alleged Sieg heil; “whit[e] guys have all the fun,” he wrote when Steve Bannon seemed to make a similar gesture. He’s been filming podcast videos with an influencer, Justin LaBoy, whom he calls “the culture’s Joe Rogan.” He has described his habit of parading around his wife, Bianca Censori, nearly nude as if she were a pet, in redpilled terms. “I have dominion over my wife,” he posted. “This ain’t no woke as[s] feminist shit.”
Maybe Ye is saying what he truly believes. Maybe mental health is at play (he used to describe himself as bipolar; recently, he’s said the accurate diagnosis is autism). Definitely, he’s trolling for publicity. In any case, he clearly believes this moment is ripe for him to capitalize on. And perhaps he’s right.
Conservatives who are proclaiming a golden age for America like to talk about the fall of “the regime,” a handy term to refer to any power center steered by liberals, including in the entertainment world. The idea is that we’d been living in a centrally planned culture of racially inclusive sitcoms and feminist pop stars, whose Millennial-pink kumbaya vibe was backed up by vicious online campaigns to shun the insufficiently woke. Now the entertainment regime is under assault through such means as Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and the Federal Communications Commission’s saber-rattling against broadcast networks. In the MAGA view, these efforts aren’t dictatorial—they’re liberatory.
This logic is credulous logic, conspiracy logic, that tends to downplay a crucial driver of culture: audiences’ desires. Certainly, the idea that 2010s entertainment was smothered by progressive politeness is overstated at best. The decade’s defining TV show was the brutal, T&A-filled Game of Thrones. Hip-hop was driven by young rappers whose music and personal lives defined the word problematic (Tekashi 6ix 9ine, XXXtentacion, Lil Uzi Vert). And, of course, Trump’s 2016 election delighted a whole new cultural scene: edgelords posting frog memes. The internet was undercutting old gatekeepers, turning culture—more than ever—into an unruly, competitive arena. If there was a regime, it was already weakening, not strengthening.
Ye has long understood the crowd-pleasing potential of chaos over conformity. Though he once scanned as a liberal protest rapper—remember when he called out George W. Bush on live TV after Hurricane Katrina?—his misogynistic streak hardly made him a consensus figure. In 2016, he got into a spat with Taylor Swift by calling her a “bitch” in a song; the resulting brouhaha damaged her reputation more than it did his. Even after he started praising Trump in 2018 and called slavery a “choice,” he still drew major collaborators and successfully orchestrated hype for new albums.
It was only in 2022 that he pushed far enough to experience something like full-on cancellation, by going full-on anti-Semite. He posted that he wanted to go “death con 3” on Jews. He told Alex Jones, “I like Hitler.” He posted a swastika on X. Consequences piled up: Adidas exited their billion-dollar partnership with Ye; Def Jam, his label, severed ties; Elon Musk, of all people, banned him from X. Yet even then, his career continued: He released an unconvincing apology to the Jews, put out an album full of big-name rap collaborations, and landed a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1. In that song, “Carnival,” he compared himself to vilified men such as R. Kelly and Diddy. “This number #1 is for … the people who won’t be manipulated by the system,” Ye wrote on Instagram at the time.
“The system”—that term is pretty close to what people mean by “the regime.” Ye wasn’t wrong to suggest that important organizations had tried to marginalize him. But if someone booted out of the system can still hit No. 1, what does the system really count for? Maybe this: Even in a culture as fractured as ours has become, people intrinsically sense the existence of a “mainstream,” shaped by widely shared beliefs, norms, and urges. Powerful institutions stay powerful by catering to that consensus. After years of Americans becoming more socially progressive—after a decade in which gay marriage was legalized and Black Lives Matter gained broad-based popularity—it made some sense that, say, diversely cast Marvel movies would be the mainstream and the erratic Hitler-loving rapper would be subcultural.
Perhaps that’s not going to be true for much longer. “You are the media,” Elon Musk told his followers on X after Trump’s reelection, speaking to a platform that, under his watch, has become overrun by white supremacists. Seemingly every other day, a pundit proclaims that Trump is spurring a “cultural revolution.” The president may have been returned to office thanks in part to widespread dissatisfaction with grocery prices, but he was also helped by young people, typically our great trend-drivers, becoming more hostile to social-justice causes. And now here comes Ye, doing that thing you do when you think the masses will buy what you have to sell: film a Super Bowl commercial.
Vestiges of “the system” have, thus far, rebuked Ye’s swastika shirt. Two days after the Super Bowl ad aired, the e-commerce platform Shopify pulled the plug on Ye’s online store, citing a violation of its terms of service in a terse statement. Ye’s talent agency dropped him, and according to his own post on X, a few employees on his Yeezy design team quit. “Maybe one day they will understand why I had to do what I did, and one day they will forgive my method,” Ye wrote on X.
As for that why: In his X posts after the shop was taken down, Ye said he started thinking about selling the T-shirts after seeing the swastika—an ancient symbol used peacefully in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions—on clothing in Japan. In his telling, the point is to shock people and show them how free they are to embrace things that society has coded as taboo. That’s also the rationale spread by his defenders. Myron Gaines of the Fresh and Fit podcast, a prominent manosphere outlet, posted that Ye’s “genius” Super Bowl stunt probably got “millions” of fans to buy the shirt—“not because we’re Nazis,” but because Ye was flouting “years of censorship.”
To reiterate: The rapper openly admires Hitler and demonizes Jews. He posted that he made the swastika shirts to show “that I am not under Jewish control anymore.” Gaines wrote that Ye has “revenge to seek for 2 years ago when the jews launched a campaign to cancel him.” So these non-Nazis … just happen to use Nazi imagery while spreading the idea that the Jews are a shadowy cabal that needs to be brought to heel. In late February, Ye posted that he’s no longer a Nazi; a few days ago, he wrote, “Antisemitism is the only path to freedom.”
The absurdity of these antics is so obvious that to expend effort condemning them can feel pointless. I sympathize with the rapper Open Mike Eagle, who posted a video calling Ye’s latest phase a “predictable meltdown nobody has time for.” He noted that Ye’s shock tactics were largely getting drowned out by the drama caused by the Trump administration, and by broader shifts in the attention economy. “Things have changed,” Open Mike Eagle said, addressing Ye. “All the counterculture jive that you used to say, that shit is all mainstream now. There’s just Nazis all over Twitter.”
Ye may well see an opportunity in the fact that what once seemed insane now can seem inane. The institutions that helped us make sense of what’s normal and what’s fringe, what’s upstanding and what’s contemptible, what’s true and what’s false, are weaker than ever. But cultural change never really did happen through the dictates of regimes—it happens through ideas and attitudes moving contagiously, person to person. We absorb how others behave, what they react to and what they don’t react to. Certain people will buy into Ye’s posture of rebelliousness, and maybe even buy his shirt, and maybe even wear it on the street. The rest of us should try clinging to our disgust.
The post Music’s Most Uncancellable Man appeared first on The Atlantic.
