Despite His Antics, Ye’s Fans Stay Loyal
ELMONT, New York — Adidas severed ties with him. His talent agency dropped him. But on a recent Friday night, an arena outside New York was filled with thousands of people who most certainly had not turned their backs on Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
Shortly before releasing “Vultures 1,” his first album since making antisemitic remarks that cost him business deals and drew widespread condemnation, Ye previewed his new collaboration with the R&B singer Ty Dolla Sign at a listening party at UBS Arena, further testing the boundaries of his fandom with lyrics that did not tiptoe around the controversy.
“‘Crazy, bipolar, antisemite,’ and I’m still the king,” Ye raps in “King,” the final song on the album, which drew a modest wave of cheers.
Wearing a full mask, the rapper, designer and longtime provocateur never showed his face as he exulted in his new music.
In recent years, as Ye’s behavior has careened from erratic to extreme, loyal listeners have had to grapple with the controversial things he has done, including wearing a shirt that read “White Lives Matter” at Paris Fashion Week, and posting on Twitter (now X) that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”
“I’ve had to explain myself to a lot of people,” said Markus Phillips, 18, listing his Jewish friends among those wondering why he has remained a fan. “I don’t support everything that he does outside of the music, but I still acknowledge how much of a generational artist he is.”
The fans who paid $140 and up for the listening party included those who professed to be thoroughly unbothered by Ye’s actions — “Doesn’t affect me,” one 18-year-old from New Jersey said with a shrug — and those who were struggling to reconcile the artist they have loved for years with the one who said “I do love Hitler” on a talk show with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“Separating the art from the artist” was a common refrain among those in attendance, as were speculations about the role that mental health played in Ye’s behavior. (He has said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.) Some preferred to believe that it was all a performance or a marketing ploy, pointing to his apology to Jews — posted in Hebrew — that was released late last year.
Whether the mainstream music industry will be willing to recognize Ye’s new music remains a question. At the arena, many fans said they found it hard to disentangle Ye from the musical nostalgia of their childhoods.
Shareef Rashid, 47 — who attended with his 13-year-old son, Jair — said he was first drawn to Ye’s 2007 album “Graduation,” with its soul samples and lyrics that resonated with him as a young, middle-class Black man of roughly the same age as Ye.
Mahatub Ahmed, 27, wore Yeezy sneakers to the show. He said he had 11 more pairs at home.
“What do they want me to do?” he asked. “Throw them away, burn them?”