As expected, Kanye West took full advantage of his highly anticipated sit-down with Akademiks to criticize nearly every prominent figure in Hip Hop.
Meeting the media personality at a hotel in Los Angeles, Kanye sported a swastika chain and a Sean John shirt as a nod to Diddy, before changing into a black Ku Klux Klan robe, which he wore for the majority of the discussion.
The nearly hour-long conversation was filled with controversy as the rap icon targeted everyone from JAY-Z and Frank Ocean to Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott.
Ye also took aim at former close collaborators such as Pusha T, Playboi Carti, Ty Dolla $ign, and John Legend, in addition to his ex-wife Kim Kardashian.
The Chicago native, who has made headlines in recent months for his increasingly provocative posts on social media, further stirred the pot by defending Diddy and R. Kelly, both of whom have been accused of sexual misconduct.
In an unexpected twist, longtime rival Drake also received some praise from Ye for his ongoing dispute with Kendrick and his legal battle with Universal Music Group.
Read on for the most shocking moments from the interview below.
On JAY-Z:
“JAY-Z, Beyoncé, you ain’t help me when I was having problems with my kids. You could have used your influence. No, your influence is for politics. Your influence is how you could use a n-gga you never wanted to sign anyway that Dame signed. You ain’t show up to my first wedding. You ain’t my family. I never had family out here.”
“Everybody knows what I’m saying is true related to that photo that I put up with my youngest daughter, but everything is like, ‘But you offended JAY-Z.’ Fuck him! How much money you think JAY-Z makes off my catalog versus what I make off it?”
“God hurts too. It hurt me that I had to hurt Jay.”
On Kendrick Lamar:
“I want Kendrick to always remember that JAY-Z tweet before he ever crosses the line.”
“The last Kendrick album, not that [GNX] but the previous one [Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers], is like a direct copy of [The Life of] Pablo. It’s like, ‘Oh, these are the drums from this song. This is the approach to this song.’”
“Why does [the NFL] want Drake to be out of there? Why do they want somebody with no hits like Kendrick to do the Super Bowl?”
On Frank Ocean:
“No one makes music that’s nowhere as near as good as [me]. When I made ‘Moon,’ it basically ended Frank Ocean’s [career]. He ain’t have a song since then! He was like, ‘Sipping some wine.’ I heard it and was like, ‘Oh, this n-gga’s never gonna be able to make another album again.’”
On Kim Kardashian:
“I didn’t want to have children with this person after the first two months of being with her, but that wasn’t God’s plan.”
“When my daughter was put on the song [with Diddy, ‘Lonely Roads Still Go To Sunshine’], that’s when I realized that I didn’t own [my children’s] name and likeness … So how is it joint custody? This white woman and this white family have control of these highly influential Black kids that are half the children of Ye.
“I tried to go to Japan and keep it calm. My dad would call me and say, ‘Ye, don’t go in on that woman because it’s gonna affect the children.’ But now it’s war. They think they’re too powerful. The Jews think they can get Kim to play with me.”
On Diddy:
“I really saw the comparison of me and Puff with the Diageo and the adidas situation. Regardless of if they could have locked me up for taxes, they wasn’t playing fair. It’s like, ‘You leaving? You leaving with nothing. We have to destroy you.’ Even though they used us to tap into the culture and make money off of Black people and people who enjoy Black culture.
“I related to Puff. And then they pulled out a video with him and Csssie from 10 years ago, and then it made everyone be like, ‘Oh, Puff’s a woman beater! He’s the Devil, he needs to be in jail.’ Meanwhile, I don’t know somebody that hasn’t gotten into an altercation with their girl at one point.”
“Puff is more like my twin. … I asked Puff back in the day like, ‘How you just made it through all of the Suge Knight shit [and everything else]?’ He was like, ‘I’m the craziest one, n-gga!’ We’re family, we can get into it.”
On Drake:
“It’s like family members that you don’t fuck with. Drake is a million times better than Kendrick and a million times more important. What Future and Young Thug have done with Drake, just culturally. That shit last year, I couldn’t barely sit through that shit. That shit was insane. That shit had Lucian Grainge, Universal, Drake lawsuit written all over it.”
“Drake needs to be my writer.”
On Travis Scott:
“Trav left me off his album [Utopia] too. Four of my songs from the ranch in Wyoming, my choruses, my exact singing lines. He replaced me with him or with other people, put Future and SZA one one of the joints, took me off with no explanation. Shit just comes out.”
On J. Cole:
“As J. Cole said, ‘False idols.’ N-gga, you’re the false idol! You can’t fuck with me no day.”
On Playboi Carti:
“Carti, you can leave me off the album and do that faggot-ass Trav shit if you want, but now you mentioned my daughter.”
“I was like, ‘Yo, this man Carti is calling my baby momma, rapping about SKIMS and then saying he needs vocals for the album!’ … That’s the time a n-gga hear me screaming from the other room and be like, ‘Why is he screaming?’”
“What one of my actual friends or someone that could call my daughter their niece would reach out to a woman that I got issues with? That’s some faggot shit … You was the first feature on Donda. The Carti shit was the final heartbreak.”
“He sent me the song [‘We Need All Da Vibes’] with Thug and Ty, we were in the studio. We were talking about doing a mixtape. And then I called him like, ‘Bro, where’s our song?!’ It feels like on Carti’s album, he’s doing everybody a favor. He didn’t need to have all them fucking features … The album could be better. That amount of songs is really ambitious. How do you do that without having me as your producer?”
“Carti took the blue pill, but he made his name off the red pill. The red pill is the n-ggas like Neo, the blue pill is the agents. So now Carti is an agent.”
On Pusha T:
“My issue with all these faggot-ass celebrity n-ggas is: if you ain’t gonna speak on my behalf with the situation I’m in right now with my children, don’t talk about my political views. Pusha T. N-gga, I bled for you! If a n-gga ask you about me, say, ‘We ain’t speaking on Ye.’ I’m the lawyer off Carlito’s Way. I’m the boss. You n-ggas is broke. You n-ggas is not masterminds. And you n-ggas should have never gone [against me].”
On John Legend:
“Look at John Legend’s old sissy ass. I ain’t never do nothing wrong to that n-gga. I changed generations of his life. And he got on that faggot-ass hot sweater — this n-gga wears sweaters in muthafucking August in Barbados. They said he smells like mashed potatoes.”
On Ty Dolla $ign:
“[Record executives] literally called Ty Dolla — this is coercion — and said, ‘Ty, you have to denounce Ye publicly or were gonna drop your artist, Leon [Thomas], and we’re gonna cancel all your tours. So they on some mob shit. They up here threatening n-ggas, stopping their money off of a statement, off of me wearing a muthafucking chain, off of me wearing their pain. But they’re playing, turning up, promoting and making money off of our pain.”
“Ty put up the tweet before we landed, he said, ‘I gotta say something.’ I said, ‘Say I’m not racist but Ye is.’ We agreed upon that. When we landed, he put up, ‘I don’t condone hate speech.’ You letting these n-ggas put words in your mouth. I 137 X’d his career. Not one, not two, not 20 — 137 X’d it … N-gga, you don’t have to denounce me! And if you do, you talk to me about how we’re gonna do it.”
On Jim Jones:
“This is my issue with Jim Jones: he says he’s gonna get a gib or a dib — I don’t know what the fuck the word is. But basically he’s gonna get a percentage if he introduces me to this crypto n-gga. And I know this shit sounds like a Tarantino movie. Jim Jones wants me to meet with Mr. Pink to make $2 million off of a crypto coin.
“I found out before the second meeting that he was gonna make this money. He said he was going to get a percentage; he didn’t tell me what it was and he ain’t say he was gonna give me a piece of it either. When I found out how much money it was, I was like, ‘You know what? I’ma take that meeting for you to get the money.’ I still took the meeting and the n-gga still got the money.
“My issue with Jim was: we were working on clothes and I said, ‘Send me a PDF of all your ideas, all the young n-ggas you know in Europe. Let the king see everything that’s happening.’ This man tells me, ‘I don’t know how to make a PDF.’ That was way more disrespectful to me than the n-gga figuring out how to get the $2 million!
“You gonna lie to me about a PDF, you faggot-ass n-gga?! After I sat and took the meeting for you and I didn’t even ask your broke-ass for a percentage?”
On tweeting “fuck Virgil [Abloh]” after his death:
“I’m evil. I am evil person.”
