Rapper and fashion designer, Kanye West’s admiration of Adolf Hitler started long before his recent antisemitic remarks, according to a new report detailing information from multiple yet unnamed former collaborators.
A new report by Rolling Stone alleges the rap icon has been quietly professing his love for the Nazi leader as early as 2003, when he was an up-and-coming artist and producer working on his debut album, The College Dropout.
Rolling Stone magazine say they spoke to almost half a dozen individuals who worked with Ye, who say the rapper’s like of the infamous German dictator is a “well-known but well-kept secret” within his inner circle.
Rolling Stone alleged that one music industry source claimed Kanye would discuss Hitler and Nazis in the studio on a “daily” basis, and even asked others of their thoughts on the German dictator. They said the the Roc-A-Fella signee would “ambush” music collaborators and industry executives with questions such as,
“So what do you think about the Holocaust?” The report says Kanye would apparently persist until the other person relented and acknowledged the “good” that Hitler had done. However, such conversations “sometimes became heated depending on the person,” the source said to Rolling Stone.
Kanye West allegedly praised Adolf Hitler on a One longtime music collaborator recalled having a “brief, tense” conversation about Hitler with Kanye in 2014. “I think my exact words were, ‘So what if Hitler did some good shit. So what?’” they remembered.
Those who did push back against Kanye’s assertions however, risked being fired, according to one of the musicians who spoke to Rolling stone. “When these things happened, if you still wanted a place in this group, you stuffed down your concerns, kept a smile on your face, and moved forward as if nothing bad had happened,” they said.
Other sources claimed Kanye West took his affinity for Hitler one step further and sought inspiration from Nazi techniques and power-gaining tactics to chart his own path to fame and success. “I feel like he used those techniques to get to where he is, to be honest,” one former collaborator said.
“He was just so fascinated by [Hitler] — someone that can have complete control over people and how he did it.” they said “I think [West] started to almost correlate how he could manipulate things to be, not the same level, but how he could try to get people to be his ‘army,’” they added, revealing that Ye would frequently talk about “building an army” and describe the work they were doing as “war.” “It’s not a stretch to now compare Kanye’s ‘by any means necessary’ methods and tactics with Adolf Hitler’s,” another source offered.
“To know that a Hitler/[Joseph] Goebbels playbook has been a central inspiration to Kanye’s own media playbook helps bring a great deal of clarity to the exact types of moves he’s been making over his career.” Kanye West’s love for Hitler has come into media focus recently, with numerous stories highlighting the depth of his admiration of the infamous Nazi leader.
It was also reported that West planned to call his eight studio album, which dropped in June 2018, Hitler before settling on ye. Last month he openly praised Hitler during an appearance on right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars podcast . When Jones suggested the rapper’s recent series of antisemitic comments inaccurately painted him as a Nazi, Ye replied:
“Well, I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone and Jewish people are not gonna tell me [who I can love].”
He added: “I’m done with the classification. Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”