The Nazification of Kanye West

‘All my niggas Nazis, nigga, heil Hitler.’ With that line, from the chorus of his new single – titled, well, ‘Heil Hitler’ – Ye has secured his place in infamy forever.

How quaint it seems now that when the artist formerly known as Kanye West began his apparent rightward drift it was by endorsing Donald Trump and donning the MAGA cap in 2016. Even his explosive comments about slavery maybe being ‘a choice’, in 2018, almost pale in comparison with the shit he’s been spraying since.

His subsequent descent into anti-Semitism, Nazi apologism, delusions both grand and paranoid, combined with lurid over-sharing about his personal life, had almost lost its ability to shock. Since fawning over Hitler on InfoWars in 2022 (improbably rendering the conspiratorial Alex Jones the moderate in the room), his routine outbursts have become the grotesque wallpaper of gossip sites and social media.

In recent months, Ye has claimed he fellated his cousin when they were minors (he’s even penned a song about it). He’s started selling t-shirts with giant black swastikas on them. He gave an hour-long interview while dressed in all-black Ku Klux Klan robes, pointed hood and all.

With a mix of disgust and sadness, many old fans have turned away, refusing to reward the attention-seeking antics of a man who has clearly gone off the deep-end, morally and mentally. Meanwhile, his new fans on the online far right have lapped it up, giddy that one of the most famous men in the world is amplifying their fetid little subculture, megaphoning their po-mo Jew hatred.

‘Heil Hitler’ feels like one last desperate stab for global attention. The lyrics are a deranged mix of the personal and political, positing his embrace of Nazism as the ultimate transgression, a raised finger of defiance to his cancellation by ‘them’. The song ends with an actual Adolf Hitler speech. Because of course it does. The hook is catchy as hell, emphasis on the hell – a chanting, horns-blaring Ye fanfare (à la ‘All of the Lights’ or ‘Power’) only with the most rancid subject matter. While it’s been taken down by all the streaming services, you can still find it on X, complete with a music video of a group of black men, dressed in animal skins.

West’s musical gift has been strikingly undimmed by his very public moral death. Half hitmaker, half aesthete, totally self-obsessed, West continues to craft jagged, darkly fascinating music, which feels like it’s hastily assembled from the broken shards of his canon and psyche: a sound that rattles between the sunny soul samples of his College Dropout debut; the street gospel of 2019’s Jesus is King and 2021’s Donda; and the nihilistic ‘darkwave rap’ he pioneered in 2013 with Yeezus.

The new stuff is often rushed, half-finished. Uploaded, then taken down, then reuploaded in new form. But even so the old spark survives. ‘It brings us no pleasure to report that Kanye West made a good Kanye West album’, reads a GQ review by Paul Thompson of Ye’s latest solo outing, Bully – a YouTube- and X-released ‘visual demo album’. I’m sure he speaks for much of the critical community.

Ye’s last two big releases, a pair of duo albums with the honeyvoiced Ty Dolla $ign, were unloved by the critics, but a hit with fans. Vultures 1 and Vultures 2 debuted at No1 and No2 in the US charts respectively. Last year, the pair headlined Rolling Loud, the rap-music festival. While the tunes are decidedly more commercial, West’s fixation with Jews still surfaces. ‘Keep a few Jews on the staff now’, he raps on Vultures 1, before the grimly predictable: ‘How I’m anti-Semitic? I just fucked a Jewish bitch.’ A defence Ken Livingstone couldn’t get away with, let alone Kanye West. The t-shirts Ye designed for that album referenced a Norwegian black-metal band, whose frontman was a convicted murderer, white-supremacist and anti-Semite.

All of that Jew hate was positively subtle compared with Ye’s latest run of singles, from forthcoming album Cuck. (Its cover art features an interracial KKK couple getting married.) Alongside ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Cousins’ – the less said about the inspiration for the latter the better – there is ‘WW3’, in which he raps in a child-like autotune about reading two chapters of Mein Kampf each night before he goes to sleep. His new fans have responded in similarly giddy fashion, posting videos of themselves singing and Sieg Heiling along to the new songs. An ancient hatred recast as juvenile rebellion; insult added to centuries-old injury.

Kanye West’s Hitlerian turn is a deeply disturbing, and depressing, PR coup for the new anti-Semitism. You can see in it how all the worst influencers are glomming on to him, delighted to ride on his black cape-tails. Ye even brought racist dateless wonder Nick Fuentes to a private dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

No one should doubt the sincerity of West’s bigotry, or explain it away by dint of his apparent mental illness. His most outrageous statements of late – accusing Jews of manipulating him and the industry; questioning the Holocaust; saying he loves Hitler, and not just for the uniforms – follow years of previously unreported private exchanges, and songs never released, which are only now surfacing. He’s long been an admirer of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, who has propagandised anti-Semitism to black America for more than 50 years.

But this is also bigotry-as-transgression, so central to the trolling, Very Online form that the Western far right now takes. Ye is saying these despicable, dangerous things not only because he believes them, but also to prove that he can. To prove that no one can stop him, can silence him. Especially ‘them’. ‘It wasn’t about the controversy. It was about the ability to say how you [feel] out loud’, he told a reporter in an airport last year.

Which is why the mass deplatforming, even debanking, of West is not only illiberal, but obviously doomed to fail – likely only to bolster his and his fans’ paranoid fantasies about Jews controlling everything. And I mean everything. West now rejects his bipolar diagnosis, claiming a Jewish doctor was trying to muzzle him, or kill him, or perhaps just make him fat, by means of the medication. (Ye now believes himself to be autistic.)

This is equal parts horror story and tragedy. Ye is clearly not a well man. He was hospitalised in 2016 with a ‘psychiatric emergency’. A tawdry custody battle followed his divorce from Kim Kardashian. His recent ‘marriage’ to Bianca Censori, an Australian architect who often appears all but naked in public, screams ‘creepy’, to say the very least (West has claimed to have ‘dominion’ over her). He has also taken to denouncing old friends as well as foes, recently saying Jay Z’s kids are ‘retarded’ and dissing his late fashion collaborator, Virgil Abloh, who died of cancer in 2021, aged just 41. When asked about this in his KKK-fit interview, West growled from beneath his black hood: ‘I’m evil.’

So this is how the reputation of a pop icon dies, with a mix of disgust and sadness. The man who across a catalogue of albums – genre-bending, trend-setting and utterly unique – escaped the hip-hop pigeonhole to become the defining popular-music figure of his generation. The glaring riposte to jaded musos who would say there has never been another Bowie or a Prince. Someone who could be weird on a huge scale.

But the tragedy of Ye is as nothing compared with the suffering of Jews, already reeling from a resurgence of militarised anti-Semitism and now having to watch their humanity degraded, and their butchers celebrated, in viral anthems. All to provide titillation to giggling online racists and salve the ego of a pop giant who is very clearly the author of his own demise. The Nazification of Kanye West is a stain not just on one man’s legacy, but also on a still-young 21st century, in which the world’s oldest hatred has made a horrifying comeback.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater