Kanye is famed for his mid-performance stream-of-consciousness rants, which address a wide variety of issues, from his aspirations to being ostracised from the fashion world, to making wild self-comparisons. Most recently he addressed all the haters out there trying to dampen his dreams by saying, “Imagine if Da Vinci or Michelangelo or Galileo were asked not to think of anything except for the one thing they first became famous for. So da Vinci could only have one idea. For all haters, I’m not saying I’m Da Vinci, but I feel it’s right for any human being to compare themselves to anything. I could compare myself to this chair, I’m saying, ‘I’ve got all this on my back, so I’m a chair.’ People get really uptight about my comparisons, but I’m an extreme speaker, and I speak through comparisons”.
Last night, however, Kanye performed a freestyle on the subject of racism and confronted the underlying narrative surrounding the Charleston shooting. This isn’t the first time he’s rightly called out the persistence of racial inequality and injustice in America. Previously having sampled Nina Simone’s cover of Strange Fruit on Blood on The Leaves from Yeezus – the chillingly accurate critique of racial terrorism in America’s south. This time around, during his performance at HOT 107.9’s birthday bash in Atlanta, Kanye did more than celebrate, he took to the stage, announcing “don’t let them make you believe that I’m crazy” before dropping a hauntingly topical freestyle over dulcet piano tones, with lyrics like “See that’s the magic of racism, it works on itself / We hate each other, screw each other, kill each other / When we can’t kill nobody else”.
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Text Samira Larouci