“Donald Trump just can’t shut up about himself.” Susan B. Glasser on the President’s discordant speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial and his grievance-filled ramble at the U.N. But, first, Kanye West had never been a stranger to provocation, but then came the Nazi stuff. Plus:
An Intimate Chronicle of Kanye West’s Fall from Grace
The rapper and producer has become a pariah, running for President and praising Hitler. A new documentary gives insight into what went wrong.
By Andrew Marantz
In March of this year, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, announced an “open casting call” to his thirty-three million followers on X. Anyone thinking of showing up for the casting call had plenty of reasons to be wary. Previous Kanye West music videos had included one in which he and the rapper Lil Pump wear ridiculous boxy costumes and impish grins while sexually harassing a gigantic Adele Givens; one in which Teyana Taylor performs a sweaty, semi-pornographic dance routine before turning into a catlike mythical beast; and one that depicts West sleeping next to nearly a dozen celebrity bedfellows, nude and snoring, including Taylor Swift, Anna Wintour, Bill Cosby, and George W. Bush—still the world’s wildest polycule a near-decade later.
But anyone who was still following West in 2025 had even more acute cause for concern, as the rest of his X post made clear. The casting call had five rules. West, a shock-jock poet on social media no less than in his music, spelled them out, with line breaks and expressive capitalization:
He implied that the casting call would be for “Carnival,” a song whose attempts at boundary-crossing were so hoary (“She ride the dick like a carnival”; “Anybody pissed off, gotta make ’em drink the urine”) that, when it came out, no one paid much attention. In fact, he was apparently casting a video for another song, one that landed so squarely on a century-old third rail that it did get people’s attention: a recent single called “Heil Hitler.” In the video, thirty-five people stand in four rows, illuminated by harsh UV light, chanting the three-word earworm of the chorus. (The first word, maximizing both shock value and cognitive dissonance, is the N-word.) The first rule of the casting call seems to be in effect, but the second, fourth, and fifth appear to have been relaxed. Some of the men are shirtless. Others wear not swastikas but vaguely Nordic-looking animal skins. Their neck muscles flex with rage; the whites of their eyes shine in the black light. Even at the end, as the camera lingers on a guy in a wolf mask and archival audio of a fulminating Adolf Hitler plays in the background, you still can’t tell whether the whole thing was supposed to be scary or funny.
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