The New Yorker:

Spotify and YouTube barred the song, which salutes Hitler, from their platforms. It found its audience, anyway.

By Kelefa Sanneh

One of the year’s most talked-about new songs, from one of the planet’s most influential musicians, is not available on Spotify, or Apple Music, or YouTube—not officially, anyway, although unauthorized YouTube versions have appeared and disappeared. (“​​We removed the content and will continue to take down reuploads,” a YouTube spokesperson told NBC News.) The artist is Kanye West, also known as Ye, who for a quarter century has roiled and revolutionized the music world. And the track, which West teased last month, and released in full last week, has a title that reads like a bad joke, or perhaps something worse than that: “Heil Hitler.”

One reasonable reaction to a provocation such as this is to follow the lead of the music-streaming companies—just ignore it. But West has spent decades demanding attention, and often justifying it. His discography includes some of the greatest and most confounding hip-hop music ever made, full of swift mood changes and uneasy juxtapositions. (On his funny and wistful 2004 début album, “The College Dropout,” he turned a reminiscence about a near-fatal car accident into a crude sexual command: “If I could go through all that and still be breathing / Bitch, bend over, I’m here for a reason.”) Around 2018, the year he released an album called “Ye,” West’s story grew more unsettled, and more unsettling. That album cover depicted a mountain range and a stark handwritten message: “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome.” It began with a grim, half-spoken track titled “I Thought About Killing You”; some fans wondered if the lyrics were about his wife, Kim Kardashian, who would divorce him four years later. In the period after “Ye,” West reinvented himself as a gospel singer, a Presidential candidate, an on-and-off supporter of President Donald Trump. More recently, he has become increasingly obsessed with Jews (in 2022, he tweeted, “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”), and with Nazis. During this year’s Super Bowl, he paid for a TV advertisement that led viewers to a website that sold a swastika T-shirt.

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