“Love everyone. Start the year clean. Just be. All love,” is a tweet from the man himself, Kanye West. Nineteen hours ago, Kanye—like the rest of us—seemed to want a clean slate for the new year. Who can blame him? 2018 was some shit. Aside from the five albums he executive produced, his year was filled with MAGA hats, slippers a size too small, and a long walk around Chicago was proof he was completely fed up with Drake. Kanye even took it to heart that the Toronto rapper was one of 123 million people following his wife on Instagram. If you’d been paying attention to Kanye’s end of year tweets, they were reflective. He was proud to be drug-free and even considered Twitter therapeutic. But an hour after his profession to “start the year clean,” he made another New Year’s declaration. “From now on I’m performing with my mutherfucking hat on.” Great.
Like any other person with too much time on their hands during the holiday season, Kanye West’s timeline is bloated with content. So there’s tweets rejoicing about the drone his dad got him for Christmas, fan art, and Graduation-inspired tattoos, but there’s also a run of sketchier shit. There’s a tweet that reads “Trump all day,” and tons of dragon emojis for the “dragon energy” he claims President Trump possesses. “One of my favorite of many things about what the Trump hat represents to me is that people can’t tell me what to do because I’m black,” he tweeted yesterday.
Videos by VICE
To me, his affiliation as a black Republican isn’t the problem. His decision to continue to wear the hat, which for many is a reminder of bigotry, is why Kanye West may never be able to “Start the year clean.” He’s not oblivious to the feeling it evokes—he sat next to a woman in tears and almost burst into tears himself when she explained what it meant to see him in the MAGA hat. His callousness to continue to perpetuate that onto a new year is unsettling. And if you thought this might just be Kanye getting the gross stuff out of the way early, he topped off his whole run of tweets with the news that he’ll soon be appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast—a fitting home for all this undercooked galaxy-braining. This is never going to end.
Kristin Corry is a staff writer for Noisey. Follow her on Twitter.
