Kanye West is a reductio ad absurdum argument incarnate. Each of the ethical issues in hiring the American rapper, arguably the most influential musician this century, to headline a music festival in London sounds like ludicrous overstatement. What if Mr West, legally known as “Ye”, had posted “IM A NAZI” on X, the social network? What about if he took out an advert during the Super Bowl with a link to a website that sold one item—a t-shirt with a swastika? What about if he recorded a song titled “Heil Hitler”? And if that song ended with an excerpt from a 1935 speech by the fascist dictator? What if he blamed this behaviour on bipolar disorder and on suffering a brain injury? What if he apologised in a full-page advertisement in theWall Street Journal?
Kanye West
Mr West has done all this and more. And so the British government faced an absurd question: should it block a rapper’s visa for three headline performances at Wireless Festival? In an act of uncharacteristic decisiveness, Sir Keir Starmer’s government did just that (the festival was promptly cancelled). In the process it created a rupture in British discourse, stranding topics on which Britain has forged a delicate compromise—freedom of speech, racism, mental health—at an absurd extreme.
Britain is no stranger to blocking arrivals. Usually the victim is a no-name rapper or Islamist preacher, which causes little uproar. Occasionally, however, it is one of the biggest acts on the planet. Mr West’s permission was approved and then whisked away, demonstrating that the state would have been happy to host Mr West if his planned trip had caused less of a fuss. If Britain seems like a place where the home secretary can ban entry based on little more than a whim, it’s because she can; if it comes across as a country with weak protections of speech, it’s because it is.
The treatment of Mr West reveals a casual, and inconsistent, authoritarianism in a country that paints itself as an inherently liberal one. Any other artist who is allowed to visit Britain will have tacit government blessing, which is good news for those planning to watch Vince Staples, an American rapper, this summer, whose lyrics include: “Bro, we know you niggas ain’t about shit/Come around, we gun ’em down/Bodies piled, Auschwitz.” In 2015 the Home Office banned Tyler, The Creator from entry because he “describes violent physical abuse, rape and murder”. A decade on, the man who was once so abhorrent he was kept out of the country will headline the All Points East festival in Victoria Park, a few miles from Mr West’s aborted gig.
Why would so many Britons pay to watch Mr West? Britain offers leeway to entertainers when they have been hateful. “I believe very strongly in fascism,” said David Bowie in 1976 in an interview with, of all places, Playboy, during a period in which his cocaine use was prodigious. Bowie died a near-saint in 2016. Household names such as the Sex Pistols have wrapped themselves in swastikas and obsessed over the Nazis. In 1970 Keith Moon, the drummer from The Who, dressed up as a member of the Waffen-SS and drove a Mercedes convertible around Golders Green, an area of London with a large Jewish population. Part of his drum kit is now in the V&A museum. Mr West’s deranged antisemitic outbursts are only the latest, intense edition of a long-held laxity, where talent typically insulates from consequence.
Forgiveness is a necessity in a civilised society. But when? Is there a clear statute of limitation on embracing Nazism, whether it is the product of bipolar mania or cocaine? Bowie offered his apologies a few years later, well before his beatification. Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, was advertising Country Life butter a few decades after he was donning swastikas. Bowie’s and Moon’s idiocies can be put down to a different era; “Heil Hitler” was released 11 months ago. The speed at which Mr West and his supporters expect people to move on triggers moral whiplash.
Even Britain’s naive, almost cuddly approach to mental illness is upset by Mr West. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, baldly accused Mr West of “using bipolar disorder as an excuse”. Labour ministers frame mental health predominantly as a problem of stigma, rather than psychosis; something to be solved by people opening up about their feelings, rather than psychiatric nurses and police wrestling someone bellowing obscenities off the street. What if their condition, like Mr West’s, seems to trigger repulsive behaviour? It is a world with which the health secretary would rather not grapple. Best to say Mr West is faking it instead.
No one man should have all that power
And what if Mr West, as Mr Streeting argues, is insincere? It is difficult to take Mr West at his word. He made a similar apology to Jewish people in 2023, two years before he put out “Heil Hitler”. What lurks in Mr West’s soul is impossible to know. The first battle in the fight against bigotry is to shut mouths, rather than change hearts. British football terraces were riddled with racist abuse until the 1980s. In a few short years, terraces fell (almost) silent when it came to racism. Did a fan who had hurled bananas at black footballers learn to view them as humans, or did he just learn to keep schtum? If Mr West does not believe in his apology yet sticks by it, he becomes the most pointed symptom of an, at times, necessary collective deceit.
Mr West is a walking, talking edge case, taking many of Britain’s delicate societal compromises to an absurd place. Were he less gifted, few would care what he said. The music festival would never have taken the risk of hiring him; Mr West would be another disturbed individual screaming the most offensive things he can think of, or another rapper banned by a state with an all-too-casual attitude to wielding its power. Instead, the heights of his talent and the depths of his flaws drive the country to discuss matters it would rather not.
