Charlamagne has said he believed that Kanye West‘s latest online tirade and public stunts are the result of him being “envious” of Kendrick Lamar‘s current success.
Over the past week, Kanye West (who now goes by Ye) has been surrounded with infamy. He was first criticised for having his wife Bianca Censori wear a see-through dress while on this year’s Grammy Awards red carpet so he could promote his upcoming Yeezy collection.
Then, last Friday (February 7), Ye shared a slew of offensive and anti-Semitic tweets where he called himself a “Nazi” and retracted his apology to the Jewish community, and showed support for Diddy and Chris Brown despite their respective sexual assault and domestic abuse charges. Ye received immense backlash and subsequently deactivated his X/Twitter account yesterday (February 9). In the time since, his Yeezy site started selling a swastika t-shirt before being shut down by operators Shopify.
While on The Breakfast Club radio show, Charlamagne theorised that “Kanye has been acting out all week because he’s envious of Kendrick’s moment”. When fellow co-host Jess Hilarious brought up that Ye said he had been diagnosed with autism, Charlamagne called it another cry for attention.
“That’s just attention seeking, he’s doing that because he’s envious of Kendrick’s moment,” he continued. “He wishes this was him because Kendrick is having a moment for being a prolific artist who took out his number one opp; Drake. Kanye wishes that was him in this moment, so he’s been doing all these antics for attention all week because he’s trying to get people to do exactly what they’re doing right now, and that’s talking about him.
“But Kanye, that is a sideshow compared to what Kendrick did on Sunday at the Grammys and what Kendrick is going to do this Sunday at the Super Bowl.”
Hilarious went on to joke about Ye’s marriage with Bianca Censori being “cheap,” which Charlamagne piggybacked off the back of, saying: “All these antics are cheap, meanwhile you got people on that stage being rewarded for their art the way that you used to, Kanye. Kendrick Lamar got rewarded five times for a diss record to your number one opp – you wish that was you. […] We don’t care, Kanye. […] I don’t care that you’re a billionaire, there’s plenty of corny-ass billionaires.”
This weekend saw Lamar became the first solo rap act to headline an NFL Super Bowl Halftime show, with SZA, Serena Williams and Samuel L Jackson all making appearances throughout his performance.
He played a medley of songs from his past and present catalogue, including ‘Not Like Us’ – which is now the most coveted rap song in Grammy history after winning five awards (including Record and Song of The Year) at this year’s award ceremony.
Coinciding with Charlamagne’s theory, Kanye dropped a new song titled ‘Beauty And The Beast’ during Lamar’s halftime show on his website, yeezy.com. The song was first previewed at a ‘Vultures’ listening experience in China last September and is expected to feature on Ye’s upcoming solo album, ‘Bully’.
In recent news, Friends‘ David Schwimmer called for Elon Musk to ban Ye from X/Twitter: “We can’t stop a deranged bigot from spewing hate-filled, ignorant bile… but we CAN stop giving him a megaphone, Mr. Musk.”