I was rooting for Kanye. But after seeing Kim’s “plea” today following years of her calling him a genius, and encouraging him running for president JUST two weeks ago, it’s time we call bullshit: Kanye does this every time he’s releasing new music.

Here are receipts.

THREAD

Late Registration - August 30, 2005

3 days later, Kanye West says “Bush doesn’t care about Black people” during a live telethon for hurricane Katrina. Woke Kanye? Nah. Clever Kanye. He becomes the talk of every household for weeks.

Late Registration sells 3.1 million copies.

Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - November 22, 2010

November 9th, Kanye gets back in the news by arranging to be interviewed by Matt Lauer to walk back calling Dubya a racist - a tightrope routine. (reminder - Matt Lauer is a sorry ass excuse of a human being)

Sells 3.1 million

Life of Pablo - February 14, 2016

The lead up to this one is LIT. Spent the end of January twitter-feuding with Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose, then trended on February 9 for tweeting “BILL COSBY INNOCENT” out of nowhere in the midst of a tidal wave of sexual assault accusations.

A day after the release, in between praising his own genius, he tweets that he’s $53 million in debt, that he’s broke and publicly begs Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page for money and to invest $1 billion into his enterprises. More headlines, more trending.

Pablo sells 94,000

Ye - June 1, 2018

Kanye mostly disappears post hospitalization for stress and sleep deprivation after ending 2016 dissing JAY-Z, Beyoncé, Obama and endorsing Trump. He resurfaced to go on TMZ on May 1st, a month before the release to say 400 years of slavery is a choice.

The next day, he tweets a fake Harriet Tubman quote. The same Harriet Tubman he just said this past weekend didn’t really free the slaves.

He tweets similar nonsense and stays trending on and off all the way up to the release.

Ye sells 85,000 copies

Jesus Is King - October 25, 2019

Kanye finds Jesus. He leads services and preach-tweets right-wing evangelism prosperity gospel. Twitter loses its mind. I got a bridge from Hawaii to Alaska for anyone who thinks Jesus Is King is about anyone other than Kanye.

Sells 109,000

DONDA - July 24, 2020

July 4, Kanye announces he’s running for president. With everything from trying to divorce Kim, to allegations that she cheated on him, every rambling tweet more shocking than the last, he’s been the top trending topic on Twitter every other day since.

This is yet another publicity stunt for declining relevance and sales by a man surrounded by a reality TV family who have nothing to lose in this election, who craves the spotlight, thrives on controversy and has capitalized off it every single time we fall for it.

Dropout and Late Registration defined my high school and early college years. I was rooting for Kanye up til now because I didn’t wanna let go. We do strange things as artists to promote new music. But Kanye’s made clear he cares about nothing and no one but Kanye.

This doesn’t mean he doesn’t in fact have bipolar disorder - he absolutely should and needs to get help.

It does mean any conversation about his mental state must include his obvious grabs for publicity and the lining of his pockets.

I’m sure the reason why Kanye and Trump hit it off so well is because they see and admire the narcissist in each other.

Our last real president called it though, and we too should call Kanye for what he is:

A jackass.

And neither he nor Trump gets a pass.

PS: Compare and contrast this tweet from Kim in 2018 with her statement earlier today. Giving billionaires a pass, who have access to / can afford the best but choose to be the worst, is how we ended up with Trump.

Kanye regularly deletes his tweets, more recently the crazy ones about divorcing Kim and Kris Jenner. But you can go back and see all of them at https://web.archive.org/web/20100915000000*/www.twitter.com/kanyewest

(You can see an archive of anyone’s tweets, deleted or not, by modifying the url)