The Kanye West Comeback is Officially On

Were you worried you hadn’t hit your ‘yikes’ quota for the tax year? Well, Ye is here to remind you that there’s no such thing as cancel culture, even if you literally called yourself a Nazi over and over and over again.

Kanye West has been announced as the headliner for all three nights of this year’s Wireless Festival in the UK. It’ll be the first time he’s performed on my side of the Atlantic since his Glastonbury performance in 2015. The fest, which has yet to announce the rest of its line-up, will take place from 10 to 12th July. Festival organisers said (via the BBC), “Ye’s UK comeback will be an extraordinary chapter in Wireless’s story.”

Do we even need to explain why this is exhausting and gross? The slow-motion train-wreck of West’s life for the past decade or so has been tough to watch. While he has evidently struggled with his mental health, his endless misogynistic and antisemitic rants, which were frequently incorporated into his music, were objectionable and inexcusable. West recently took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to apologise for his behaviour. He said that his bipolar disorder led him to lose tough with reality and made him gravitate towards “the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika.” He sold merch with the swastika on it and released a song called ‘Heil Hitler.’

I hope West is seeking the help he needs. Bipolar can be an all-consuming and destructive force that alters your personality. For the sake of his kids, I hope he’s working on himself, but let’s not pretend he was a progressive bastion whose mental illness forced him into goose-stepping and hanging around with Andrew Tate. But it’s also so telling how quickly the music industry leapt to welcome West back after that apology. What safeguards will they put in place to stop him, you know, releasing more swastika merch or threatening his ex-wife’s new boyfriends? Oh, he has a new album out, by the way. It’s called Bully. Pitchfork gave it a 3.4 rating and said it was “a hollowed-out shell of his former self.”

Maybe I’m cynical but I don’t have much confidence that West won’t descend into the same old behaviour. It’s not like he’s really faced much in the way of professional repercussions for being so antisemitic that even Alex Jones thought he needed to relax. Plenty of people kept listening to Ye, almost brainwashed by the idea that maybe, one day, he’d go back to being the old Kanye. Never mind that the new music was unlistenable; it was also heralded by all the other antisemites and Trump-loving trolls who revelled in Kanye’s descent into hatred and bigotry. This egomaniac is surrounded by yes men with even grosser politics than him. What’s to stop him returning to that if it gets him enough attention and Spotify streams?