In May 2025, Kanye West, also known as Ye, released his single Heil Hitler. It was the logical conclusion to several years of racist, sexist and homophobic outbursts, and the song ended with a lengthy sample from one of the Nazi dictator’s speeches. This was only a couple of months after he stepped out in his new swastika T-shirt, which he also made available from his website for $20. Merch is so important in brand-building these days.
An epic list of companies had already broken links with West after similar disgraces in 2022. After last year’s Nazi outrage, he was sued by his own talent agency, while the Australian government revoked his visa and blocked him from entering the country. By 2025, Russell Brand and Andrew Tate were among his last remaining allies.
So when it was announced this week that he would be headlining all three days of this year’s Wireless festival
in London’s Finsbury Park, it was, shall we say, a little surprising. The news immediately brought widespread condemnation from Jewish groups, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey.
In a press release on Monday, the Wireless organisers, Festival Republic, said West’s “UK comeback will be an extraordinary chapter in Wireless’s story”. Maybe the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl can shoot the film version? Is Albert Speer available to help out with set design and lighting? Maybe the SS can do the stewarding.
A vapid rage-bait headliner for your festival may be apt in the age of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but the truth about West is that like most bigots, he’s a crashing bore. These are simply the celebrity equivalents of the energy-sink in the pub who is high on his own supply of “did I just say that?” transgression.
The only way to read the decision is that West has been booked not in spite of his bleak penchant for “controversy”, but because of it. And that he has been booked not because of his musical output (ever-more self-indulgent, boring and unpleasant), but in spite of it.
This is the music industry at its most venal, cynical and depressing, and Festival Republic, owned by the beast that is Live Nation, are the ones that should be in the frame. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this grim and tawdry affair is that, for the execs behind the scenes, there really is no such thing as bad publicity, only notoriety. We don’t know what any of the aforementioned were thinking, because they have refused to comment. So let me pose a couple of questions here instead.
Dear Live Nation: will you be selling the swastika T-shirts at the Wireless merch stalls?
Dear Pepsi (the festival’s sponsor): which song off Ye’s new album do you think best reflects your brand values? Is it All the Love, which had the working title Gas Chambers?
The cynicism of West’s surely lucrative comeback can be seen from the new moon mission. Prepping the latest album and live announcements, at the end of January he took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal professing an apology – “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people” – and blaming his repeated toxic outbursts on bipolar disorder. I cannot speak to an individual person’s experience of bipolar. But it should be noted that West has recanted his antisemitism before – and then repeated it again.
Judaism, like all religions, teaches forgiveness for past wrongs, if it is clear the culprit’s apology is genuine, persuasive and heartfelt. But there is nothing compelling about West’s at all. And in any case, music criticism teaches no such latitude for being a boring rapper.
Because, for all that it may be worth, his new album is the sound of desperation, a succession of insincere, half-sketched pleas to be let back into the canon – but without the musical chops to back it up. The reality of West’s recent output is not just that it’s cringeworthy in its eagerness for attention, or adolescent in its mistaking of controversy for the avant garde, but that it is devoid of wit and charm. Rap music really requires you to have a reasonable supply of at least one of the two. Pitchfork called it “a cheap hit of retro-Kanye”. The operative word is “cheap”.
The mining of notoriety for money in pop music is as old as pop music itself – and from 2 Live Crew to Kendrick v Drake, rap music has seen its fair share. But it is another truism of the pop world that while we’re all gawping at the unwell person bursting into flames for our entertainment, there are some very rich men in suits in a boardroom somewhere behind them, transmuting the ashes into gold. So when you’re looking aghast at the toxic troll on stage, just remember who put him there and why.
