Does Ye have a way back?
It gets harder to defend Kanye West every day. This time, however, it would be wrong, and quite frankly impossible, to look to defend the off-kilter fashion and music mogul.
As the sun began to set in Paris on 3rd October, the pop-culture polymath, Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) prepared to debut Yeezy Season 9 in Paris’ 8th arrondissement. However, the clothes, co-designed by Yeezy and Hood By Air founder Shayne Oliver, paled in comparison to what Ye had to say and wear to the show.
The music and fashion tycoon turned up to the off-calendar runway presentation for his ninth Yeezy collection in a long-sleeve T-shirt; printed on the back were the words “white lives matter” – a hate slogan, used by the KKK, the Aryan Renaissance Society and other white supremacist groups to facilitate racial hate.
Image Credits: @photosofkanye on Instagram
It seems to me that in undertaking this strange, political stunt, Ye has unashamedly turned his back on the disenfranchised black community, for whom he claims to be a voice – his music certainly speaks to the support of disempowered African Americans. Impact art also has its place within Ye’s music discography; most recently, setting fire to an exact replica of his childhood home on stage, to signify finally moving on from his late mother’s death…but this goes beyond that. There is a fine line between shocking people through the power of art and causing irreparable damage to various sections of society, and this seems to have only accomplished the latter. In the wake of the incident, past friend, and previous employee of Ye’s, Tremaine Emory (also the current creative director of Supreme) referred to the billionaire as a “Judas Goat” whose intention is to “lead sheep to the slaughter”. Emory is not wrong in the slightest – Ye is clearly abusing his enormous influence over the masses, a lot of whom are likely to be highly impressionable.
So, the question everyone had to ask was why? Just why would Ye, who does not struggle for relevance one bit, throw away his hard-won cultural clout for the sake of headlines being made about him? The obvious answer might be that “controversy sells”, and “bad publicity is better than no publicity at all”. This is something Donald J. Trump (for whom Ye has been a fervent supporter for some time) touched on in his book The Art of the Deal. Ye himself wouldn’t be blind to this notion, but he also wouldn’t have been oblivious to the damage that he was inevitably going to do through this feat.
However, in a 20-minute interview with Clique TV, Ye’s explanation for the t-shirt was that: “at a certain point, it felt like I saw white people wearing Black Lives Matter shirts like they were doing me such a favour by reminding me that my life mattered […] so, I thought I’d return the favour to let white people know that their life mattered too”. Make sense? I thought not.
If the fact that Ye sported the t-shirt on the world stage wasn’t bad enough, it was also reported that the horrific shirts were being handed out by Yeezy to the homeless on Skid row, Los Angeles – North America’s biggest homeless village. Not only is this extremely exploitative, using those in need of clothes as the vessels for such an awful message, but it also puts the homeless in a position of danger and risk of harm. A bigger concern, though, is if Yeezy Season 9 goes into mass production, resulting in the White Lives Matter shirts being sold to consumers which then becomes a moral concern in itself. The very clothes that we pick out of our wardrobe in the morning are an expression of ourselves, however interested in the art of fashion one may be. Therefore, having the statement emblazoned onto a shirt cannot be understood in some sort of abstract, artistic sense or considered as an ironic, political declaration, like Ye supposedly intended. In the fashion industry, and the world more broadly, our words always have consequences, and evil utterances from hate groups should never be downplayed for the intention of so-called ‘fashion’ – especially during Black History Month, when the aim should be to elevate repressed black voices, not diminish them.
So back to the question – does Ye have a way back? The answer is yes, he does. Yeezy was last valued at around $4.7 billion, meaning the goliath company is not going anywhere anytime soon. Ye himself has also recently acquired the conservative social media platform Parler, which supposedly champions freedom of speech – meaning his extreme bigotry will be allowed a voice. In that case, this recent controversy begs the question: what would it really take to fully ‘quit’ Ye?
