Kanye West and the downfall of a billionaire

Kanye West has been courting controversy for years, said Christopher Grimes in the FT. In 2009, the billionaire rapper and businessman ambushed Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at a music awards event, invading the stage to claim that Beyoncé should have won instead. In 2018, he said that for black Americans, slavery had been a “choice”. In between, there were erratic outbursts, feuds, and flirtations with the far-right.

Through all this, West continued to “enjoy the support of the entertainment and fashion industries, thanks to his ability to sell records, sportswear and concert tickets”. But last month, all that unravelled, when he wore a shirt bearing the slogan “White Lives Matter” at a fashion show in Paris, then unleashed a barrage of antisemitic comments – starting with the tweet that he was going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”. Within days, he’d been suspended by Twitter, and dropped by his talent agency, his lawyers, his bankers, and a range of creative partners, including Gap.

Yet he might have survived the furore, said Andrew Lawrence in The Guardian, had Adidas not crumbled, and said that it would no longer distribute his Yeezy shoes – a move that wiped $247m from its quarterly profit forecasts. “Now, with just about all his collaborators gone, West isn’t just off Forbes’s billionaire list. He’s a toxic asset.” Even the right-wing pundit Candace Owens – who wore the same T-shirt as him in Paris – won’t have him on her show; and last week, he was escorted out of the HQ of the footwear brand Skechers, after turning up there unannounced.

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‘What took them so long?’

My only question, said Ryan Coogan in The Independent, is what took them so long? West suffers from bipolar disorder, which might have played some part in his behaviour; but what excuse do these firms have for turning a blind eye to his hate-filled rhetoric “right up until the moment” they couldn’t afford not to?

That West has been ejected from polite society may look like a blow against antisemitism, said Yair Rosenberg on The Atlantic. And it is “better than the alternative”. But the “cruel paradox” is that it also risks fuelling the delusion that it was designed to combat – that Jews control the world. And make no mistake, West’s espousal of this conspiracy theory was not unusual: it was just harder to ignore.

Last week, there was outrage when a banner reading “Kanye is right about the Jews” appeared over an LA freeway; but neo-Nazis have been hanging antisemitic banners there for years. It took a celebrity meltdown to “momentarily focus attention” on a prejudice that “society prefers not to notice”.