Kanye West’s Interview With DJ Akademiks Is His Clearest Attempt To Sink Hip-Hop To His Level

Over the past decade or so, hip-hop found it increasingly impossible to ignore Kanye West. What started off as media witch hunts over interrupted VMAs speeches and artistic controversies evolved into a painful discourse around his legitimately bigoted and abhorrent behavior. But through it all, Ye still worked with some of the biggest artists in the game, found success in his newer music, and put every media outlet under the sun in a tough position when it comes to covering his antics. Even writing this very article can be understandably seen as visible acknowledgements of his attacks, and even if we oppose them, we are very much contributing to his mission of hurting as many of his “enemies” as possible. Sadly, such is the consequence when you are as big as the Yeezy mogul. But this DJ Akademiks interview shows that’s not a bug in the system: it’s a feature.

Of course, it’s easy to take this at face value. Ak lets Ye’s black KKK outfit and various bigoted statements slide, despite some efforts to redirect the conversation, and instead, allows the Chicago artist rattle off a Twitter rant IRL, albeit with some new revelations and statements which somewhat clarify his approach. Yet, in our view, Kanye West really wants to make everyone around him experience his pain. Not just the “invisible hands” against him, but his fans, his haters, his peers, and so on. There are specific circumstances exacerbating that philosophy, and also long-lasting benefits of the doubt that provide perpetual excuses for it on behalf of the Kanye fandom. But “He made Graduation” pleas are shrinking by the day, even if that blindly loyalist statement is his ultimate goal.

Still, in order to make this stance clear, self-benefitting, and unchallenged, there was really only one place where it made complete “sense” for Kanye West to go. DJ Akademiks is not just a long-time fan and apologist, but he comes pre-packaged with some of the biases, presumptions, and industry skepticisms that Ye wants to exploit. The Kendrick Lamar and Drake coverage is just the tip of the iceberg, albeit a massive one considering Ak’s OVO loyalty. Through his coverage of figures like Andrew Tate, his Donald Trump endorsement, and many viral rants on sociopolitical topics, he threw himself in the right-wing media grift landscape. This checks one of Ye’s boxes considering his previous Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson conversations, and Akademiks’ reign as hip-hop’s top media dog keeps the 47-year-old’s statements in-house, to a degree.

In addition, it’s important to emphasize how Rumble and Twitter hosted this interview, and their generally flippant (and willful) ignorance when it comes to platforming fascist ideology. It creates the perfect firestorm for Kanye West to be as incendiary as he wants while still finding bigoted validation for doing so. However, to DJ Akademiks’ credit, he does try on occasion to get a more grounded and personal answer out of Ye. But the Atlanta-born rapper just breezes past questions about disrespecting Virgil Abloh, new music, encouraging hate, and what his actual industry relationships look like. He either completely ignores them to rant about the Kardashians again or doubles down on his combative evasions of real issues and hypocrisies. Most disappointingly, Akademiks affirms his interest in Kanye no matter what he does, which is exactly the kind of abusive relationship Kanye seeks to create with everyone.

With all that said, though, we cannot ignore many hip-hop platforms who would likely host Kanye West, even these days. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that Big Boy sat down with him and Ty Dolla $ign for VULTURES, and there’s a whole city’s worth of right-wing media pundits and rap commentators would do anything to talk to him. The difference between this interview with DJ Akademiks and something like, say, Drink Champs, is Ye’s mission to emulate “free speech” as much as possible. Ak is all about the kayfabe of keeping it real, uncut, and unfiltered. He also won’t push too hard on the music if Kanye is already on a roll with his rants, and his fanbase is precisely the demographic that Kanye wants to target. It’s not enough to just make “woke” people angry; he needs to make money selling something to someone.

Kanye West needs to call all the shots as he rolls out Bully, and DJ Akademiks is a fitting mouthpiece for this vision, even if the last thing Ye cares about at this point is the music. It’s also why he expresses so much jealousy and spite for artists like Playboi Carti, Jay-Z, Travis Scott, and many more whom he feels owe him gratitude and loyalty for boosting their careers. In fact, Ye basically wants everyone to kiss the ring but will still scold them for it, adding another layer to this Stockholm syndrome of Kanye fandom and collaboration. It’s the kind of thing traditional hip-hop media would either not take seriously or look down on him for, which is why he probably stopped looking for the Big Boys and N.O.R.E.s of the rap world.

Those commentators would actually put Kanye West in a box in his eyes, trying to get him to reach a compromise with his values in order for us to maintain our celebrations of his indelible musical legacy (where that legacy starts and ends is up to you). But “compromise” is not a word in the Ye vocabulary, probably because homophobic slurs have filled it up so much as of late. He wants everyone around him to say, “I am Kanye West!” and experience the same amount of pain and backlash he gets for all of his missteps and misdeeds. You know that smug TikTok guy on the plane with the “I voted for a convicted felon” shirt? That’s the ideal Yeezy fan. It’s all soldiers and enemies in Kanye’s world, and he burdens everyone in it with his actions but himself.

More specifically, he attempts to wield his celebrity power to become the unforgiving and wrathful system he believes blocked him from being a rapper at Roc-A-Fella, rejected him in the fashion world, and so on. When Ty Dolla $ign chose to distance himself from Kanye West’s rhetoric, this provided another case study for Kanye to use as an example of how Jewish people control the world or whatever his performative bigotry is. So at the end of the day, Ye creates a vicious cycle of burned industry bridges that further fuel his behavior. And all the while, DJ Akademiks and hip-hop media observers like us are left with the charred remains to pick over, using the 2004-2018-ish run to try to make sense of it all.

It’s impossible to tell if this complex situation will actually set some sort of precedent for hip-hop media moving forward. In many ways, Kanye West represents the dangers of musical meritocracy in a genre with a broader culture, as connecting with fans in such an influential and massive way gives these artists a lot of power. Not just unchecked power under exploitative capitalism in the hip-hop space, but anthropological power when it comes to shaping young minds and defining the values of hip-hop culture. It feels like, in decades prior, people vilified Ye for so many trivial in the grand social scheme, which led him to use his consistent contrarianism to actually say and do some truly horrible things. By the time he fully embraced them, we became too comfortable treating it like another Kanye antic, not fascistic dangers.

How far back Kanye West’s controversies and bigotries go is another article entirely, as recent years gave dark context to many past iconic moments. But sadly, at the risk of giving into a defeatist mentality, there’s really only one answer as to how much further they will last. Ye took over the world and now wants to drag it down to his level, admitting that jealousy, pain, and megalomania are the driving force behind his non-strategic and uninformed crashouts. He embraces God’s wrath as a self-proclaimed deity, only seeking revenge without any legitimate concerns for change. That is Kanye’s way of showing power, and if other artists can wield it similarly, then exploited – and exploitative – hip-hop media figures like DJ Akademiks will keep selling their souls to the devil.