Kanye West’s Fans Love Him The Way He Is, and That’s Why He’ll Never Change

I wasn’t surprised when it was announced that Kanye West would headline the Wireless Festival in London. The news came mere months after West issued a full-page apology in the Wall Street Journal wherein he apologised for his recent descent into all-out Nazism and claimed it was all down to his struggles with bipolar disorder. It wasn’t a shock that the entertainment industry scrambled so quickly to pave the way for more Ye-related profit. What was more surprising was the speed with which both corporate sponsors and the British government responded to the news. West was quickly banned from entering the UK, Pepsi dropped out of sponsoring the festival, and soon, Wireless was cancelled altogether rather than finding another headliner.

West fans rushed to defend him, as they always do. Hasn’t he suffered enough, they said? Hr apologised and you still want him to suffer? You just don’t understand mental illness. Something something cancel culture. We’ve heard all of this before, back when he was making creepy music videos with nude Taylor Swift dolls, or defending R. Kelly, or saying he was going to go Defcon 3 on Jewish people, or when he said that slavery was a choice. We could be here all day listing the bigotry and hatred of Kanye, the lion’s share of which he has never apologised for or even acknowledged. There’s a reason his all-too-brief apology tour rings hollow to those not in his thrall. One would imagine that apologising for selling swastika t-shirts and releasing a song called “Heil Hitler” would require a period of remorse longer than three months.

In a piece for Vulture, Craig Jenkins wrote, “Ye is wishing aloud for the chance to promote healing, but the plans seems to revolve around receiving millions of dollars to carry out his day job, a restoration of pre-2022 conditions.” There’s the nail in the head right there. Even if West’s very public and painfully milquetoast newspaper ad apology to the Jewish community read as sincere - and it certainly does not - what work has he actually done to prove it? At what point in this cycle of contrition has he ever been truly humbled or inconvenienced by the hard work of restorative justice? Indeed, his complete refusal to evolve has only benefitted him. The worse he gets, the more the Ye stans fall to their knees in worship.

In less than three months, he went from apologizing for repeatedly singing “Heil Hitler” in a song to selling out arenas to throngs of adoring fans who never abandoned him. Dave Chappelle was cheering him on. So were Halle Bailey and Lauryn Hill. A lot of comment section ink was spilled with lavish insistences that we offer grace to West during his personal nadir, and that his apology was good enough for people to overlook literally everything else he hasn’t apologized for. The whataboutism cycle was dizzying, as were the open slurs and, yes, antisemitism. Ye fans barely took a breath before switching their defences of Nazism from claims it was a performance art piece to smearing critics as ableists because of his bipolar disorder. The sunken cost fallacy was taken to new depths with Ye standom.

A lot of perennially online modern fandom at its most virulent is a ceaseless search for victory. These fans, who are usually the loudest if not the most numerous, are proud attack dogs turned unpaid publicists who see the act of loving a celebrity as something to be won. They obsess over Spotify steams, Billboard charts, and random best-of lists with the statistical zeal of an unhinged Nate Silver. Artists drop dozens of variants to help game the charts and fans comply with it, ready to attack anyone who calls it out (see how Zara Larsson made a pretty anodyne joke about Swifties’s charts obsession and ended up being harassed for days on end over it.) There’s a heavy edge of victimization to this charade, the desperate need to position one’s endeavours as those of scrappy underdogs, even if their idols are literal billionaires. The world roots against your fave so you double down and get worse.

Ye’s fans are no different from any number of fandoms I could name here that have earned notoriety for their cruelty and attack dog tactics. Many of them also defend their idols’ bigotry as though they were being paid to do so. With West, however, it’s tough to ignore to many of those fans are parroting the hate he know claims was part of a years’ long mental health break. The Nazis really loved this era of Kanye. They cheered him on when he appeared on Alex Jones’s show. They “ironically” bought the swastika merch. They supported him allegedly bringing his eldest daughter to hang out with Andrew Tate. They sang along to “Carnival”, wherein he declared himself to be like Bill Cosby and R. Kelly.

Maybe not every West fan was like this. I certainly saw more than a few drop their support of him once he said he saw good qualities in Hitler, and years before that as the music drastically dropped in quality. But he wouldn’t have been able to sell out his recent concerts had he been condemned by even a portion of his fans. Either they didn’t care about the Nazism or they supported it. We know that fans often grasp at straws to defend their apathy (hello, adult Harry Potter fans.) Why would the Ye wagon be any different? It’s not as though we live in an era where consequences truly exist for Nazis. Endorsing fascism to own the libs is, alas, now a pathetically common occurrence.

But the ways people defend Kanye have always been the same: they do so under the belief that his almighty genius exempts him from reality, and that every error he makes is actually part of a game of four-dimensional artistic chess. Every dumb lyric, misogynistic rant, or toadying with Trumpites was dismissed as something the rest of us just didn’t get. See, he’s so ahead of us mere mortals in his brilliance that we could never comprehend his artistic grandeur. Well, that or the music is just too good and art versus artist or whatever (hearing this defence with any album after The Life of Pablo was particularly audacious. Poopity scoop, you say?) You can do whatever you want if the Pitchfork score is high enough, I suppose.

West has clearly been surrounded by yes men for a long time, the kind of financially and politically motivated stooges who enjoyed access to celebrity and had no qualms about abetting a mentally ill man’s downward spiral. But his fans were the loudest of the yes men for a long time too. How can someone truly confront the consequences of their own actions if everyone in the crowd is telling them they’re too much of a genius to need to do so? I have to wonder what these fans get from this. Do they enjoy seeing Kanye suffer? Or are they eager to have yet another excuse to be as nasty in their normal lives as they’ve always wanted? They don’t want him to show the accountability he claims he’s eager to express, and that seems more likely to influence West than any sense of true guilt or altruism. Not that it matters. Regardless of what happens next, these fans aren’t going to demand better. They’re too busy pretending his new album is listenable.