As a writer, there’s occasionally a story you’re obliged to write, not because the subject is particularly important, but more because they’re famous or infamous. The distinction between the the two gets lost a lot these days, when nearly anybody can be famous for doing nothing, or can get even more so for behaving like a toddler, so long as the behavior happens on social media in real time.
That’s today’s dilemma where Ye, ne Kanye West, is concerned. Over the weekend he was welcomed back to Twitter. Ye started the process of sending his own billion-dollar empire up in flames with an antisemitic tweet (feel free to excuse yourself here if your immediate response to that sentence was a daft-ass rationalization of why kAnYe cAn’T bE aNtIsEmItIc.) With most of his wealth wiped out, his most valuable partnerships thrown off an irreparable bridge and his music less interesting than it’s ever been, Ye’s news value is propped up by the fact that he’s Ye, a guy those of us old enough to remember the early 00s remember as, for a moment, the hottest rapper/producer in hip-hop.
All of which is to say that Ye did some shit over the weekend that nobody should care about but which folks with platforms like this one have no choice but to shed light on. He appeared in a video alongside this weirdo talking about running for president in 2024, showing off new “merch” under a label he called Ye24, and spit some nonsense about diversity being the opposite of unity that I’m sure, in a comments section somewhere, has people with eighth-grade literacy levels calling him a genius. In his first few posts back on Twitter, from which, again, he was suspended for threatening Jewish people, Ye posted “Shalom”, Hebrew for “peace”.
None of this is important. Even if he’s serious about running for office, Ye will absolutely, positively not be the next president of the United States and doesn’t deserve to be covered as if that aspiration is serious. His new clothing line might yet be a hit because his stans have proven they’ll continue throwing money at anything he does, but it won’t likely have anywhere near the cultural influence his earlier efforts did. His appearance with the hateful troll Milo Yiannopoulos says he’s unserious about switching up the company he keeps in the wake of a serious of disastrous, self-inflicted wounds to his legacy.
Long term, none of it will matter, and it wasn’t much worth the time I, or any writer, spent squeezing out these words. It won’t do much besides help Ye’s name trend.