Or as my wife puts it, “Too many dollars, not enough cents”.
The main issue I have with treating “Kanye West” like a deadname is that he continued to use it after his name change. Google his Jesus is Lord album (the one that came after Ye) and see what name is on. His Twitter, last I checked, still used Kanye.
What’s more, so much of the media about him uses the name “Kanye West” (which is probably way people like @Qadgop_the_Mercotan didn’t know about the change despite following at least some news about him). And yet Ye has not objected to this.
I admit, I use “Ye” because I’m somewhat uncomfortable calling him “Kanye” without an explicit claim that it’s okay. But I still don’t think we can analyze it the same way we would a trans person who has declared their former name to be dead. We have no indication that he even wants people to stop using his former legal name, let alone that its use causes him any sort of trauma.
Who would mourn him? His children, don’t you think?
Ha ha no one would ever call anything something that… oh no
No, but now I absolutely love the song. It just took the right video vision to make me realize the artistic vision Ye/he was going for. Hilarious!
I actually do think those are better lyrics. I’m not saying they are good lyrics, but better than than fuck shit stack* I posted.
*No disrespect to Reggie Watts. That song/video is legit talent.
I don’t know anything about his music but the first time I heard his name in the news he sounded like a few cards short of a full deck. And it’s gotten worse over time.
I’ve always loved the second verse of All Falls Down from College Dropout. Kanye is remarking on materialism, self-esteem, racism, vanity, his own shortcomings, emptiness, futility, etc. It’s weird to see someone who wrote this become what he is now.
Man, I promise, I’m so self-conscious
That’s why you always see me with at least one of my watches
Rollies and Pashas done drove me crazy
I can’t even pronounce nothin’, pass that Ver-say-see
Then I spent four hundred bucks on this
Just to be like, “Nigga, you ain’t up on this”
And I can’t even go to the grocery store
Without some Ones that’s clean and a shirt with a team
It seem we livin’ the American Dream
But the people highest up got the lowest self-esteem
The prettiest people do the ugliest things
For the road to riches and diamond rings
We shine because they hate us, floss 'cause they degrade us
We tryna buy back our 40 acres
And for that paper, look how low we’ll stoop
Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga in a coupe
He apparently was clinically diagnosed as bipolar in 2016. He has gone back and forth on that ever since, sometimes claiming he was misdiagnosed, at other times acknowledging it.
It took me a while to realise how to pronounce his new name.
If you need to summon his supporters do you just sing ‘Oh come all Ye faithful’?
I’m not a big fan, but I did listen to his first few albums and I thought he had some pretty contemplative and understandable/empathetic statements in some of those albums.
Was Kanye rich growing up?
Some context here: Deplorable: How Kanye West went from beloved generational rapper to far-right Hitler apologist
To prove once and for all that execrable, vomit-inducing music made by absolutely talentless hacks can make you big bucks: These guys sold 120 million records. (sorry to everybody, but I post it for science)
Q.E.D.
People have been talking about his brain having something wrong with it for a LONG time, and that talk has been almost entirely based on fairly convincing evidence related entirely to Ye’s behaviour. This isn’t an overreacting to a single blowup like Britney Spears, or when some people were saying Dave Chappelle was disturbed because… he turned down a lot of money to do more seasons of his show.
Whether it’s specifically bipolar disorder, though, one cannot say for sure. It’s SOMETHING though.
To bad, so sad. He’s still an asshole though. Maybe his disorder takes the asshole filter off, but he’s still an asshole.
I’m certainly not absolving him of his sins. He isn’t, to my knowledge, literally psychotic and unable to discern right from wrong.
RE: Kanye vs Ye. The latter isn’t even a different name, it’s just a shortening of the former. Plus, even if he did legally change it, it amounts to a stage name. If I call Bob Dylan “Robert Zimmerman”, am I really insulting him because I know his former name?
I don’t think he’s a musical genius at all. The most genius thing he did was sample Ray Charles. Even that song wasn’t really groundbreaking. Popularity does not even factor into whether a person is moving the form forward. Death Grips is a lot closer to genius, and far less popular.
One of the ways I manage to convince myself that I am not totally out of touch is that I like Taylor Swift. Not enough to have her on playlists, but I’m not a big music person in general. I listen to news in my car.
However, I actually appreciate her voice, and I understand the appeal of her lyrics.
And I have never made it all the way through a Kanye West “song.”
It’s not for lack of appreciation of rap, either, because I do like some early rap music, and I can point to specific qualities in Kanye West’s songs (I cannot call a person Ye, because it feels like I’m using the archaic objective plural second person) that irriate me.
The fact that a lot of people buy something does not make it good. A lot of people buy margarine and Pepsi.
Can’t really add much to the train wreck that is Ye, but at least I learned why he named a couple of his albums Donda. I didn’t even realize it was a name. 
He’s definitely keeping a PR firm somewhere afloat, that’s for sure.
Yeah, that figures, praising Hitler is such good PR…