How the rapper found chart success despite a litany of hateful rhetoric.
This week, Ye scored his first No. 1 on the “Hot 100” since 2007’s “Stronger” — not by making a particularly good song but by listening to the kids.
Make no mistake: Controversy of his own creation continues to fuel some of that hype. More than a year after spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric that cost him deals with Adidas, Balenciaga, and Gap, Ye is still finding inspiration in neo-Nazi ephemera. He is still taking shots at Drake. Ye is still Ye.
The same can be said of his art: The chart-topping “Carnival,” with Ty Dolla $ign, finds him in his most maximal, balls-to-the-wall bag in years. Few artists would think to turn a boorish recording of Italian soccer fans into the heaving backbone of a star-studded posse cut. A resurgent Rich the Kid takes the hook (why not?), there’s a callback to “Hell of a Life” (why not?), and our protagonist says he’s “Ye-Kelly, bitch” (hard pass).
But it’s the raspy turn from Playboi Carti, where he melts Future’s croak into Flubber, that might’ve sledgehammered “Carnival” to the top. As fans tell it, it’s either one of Carti’s most mesmerizing verses to date or borderline parody, and it’s since been popularized on TikTok by the dancer evandagreat26. (It’s worth noting that Vultures 1 wasn’t affected by the UMG’s fight with the social media app because Ye is no longer on Def Jam.)
On a musical level, Ye recognizes the power of featuring Carti, whose mystique has grown exponentially since his pulverizing 2020 album, Whole Lotta Red, and subsequent rise of his record label Opium. For rabid fans who crave his art partly because of how scarce it is, these moments with Ye are canon events in the Carti-verse. But Ye also understands how constant alignment with the Atlanta rapper — featuring him in one of his videos, bringing him out for listening parties, allegedly throwing him on the as-yet-unreleased Vultures 2 — opens him up to a massive younger audience that’s willing to look past his litany of hateful comments, just as they did Carti’s own allegations of choking his girlfriend. Carti has almost become a Ye for Gen Z: an edgy, multi-hyphenate star with a catalogue alchemized for eternal mosh pits and collective misogyny and a taste in fashion that has been endlessly co-opted and mood-boarded.
Many of the fans I encountered at Ye’s New York listening party last month looked no older than 15. Several I talked to discovered him through TikTok. (Based on my scant boots-on-the-ground reporting, the canon has shifted slightly; Graduation ranks much higher these days.) And Ye has materially given himself over to a newer generation, selling everything on his website for an affordable $20, tweaking albums based on reception, and gauging fan interest in his unofficially released music for the first time since the weekly G.O.O.D. Fridays drops. He’s also basically been co-opting the social language of a SoundCloud rapper, engaging with listeners directly online. In the last few days, he’s had conversations with a popular Ye fan account over DMs about an idea to sell Vultures 2 exclusively on his website. To another, he jokingly said he’d put a hyped-up leak on an upcoming album if people bought it for $200 a pop.
This has all been happening as Ye fans continue to grumble about his recent faceoff with DSPs, which highlights a contradiction inherent to his, and any, anti-establishment stance that hinges on populism. You can’t appeal to everyone if you’re trying to create something new. For now, he’s once again achieved the remarkable feat of ensuring that no matter what, somebody will care about the music.
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