A few months back, during the album rollout for his most recent project Ye, Kanye West showed up to TMZ and ruffled a lot of feathers when he said, “When you hear about slavery for 400 years… for 400 years? That sounds like a choice.” Kanye got a lot of blowback from that statement, and in an appearance this morning on WGCI, a radio network in Chicago, West decided it was time to apologize.
Here’s his full comment”
“I have never really approached or addressed the slavery comment fully. This is something about the fact that it hurt people’s feelings and the way that I presented that piece of information. I could present in a way more calm way, but I was ramped up. And I apologize. That happens sometimes when people are—I’m not blaming mental health, but I’m explaining mental health.” Adding, “I don’t know if I properly apologized for how the slavery comment made people feel. I’m sorry for the one-two effect of the MAGA hat into the slave comment, and I’m sorry for people that felt let down by that moment. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk to you about the way I was thinking and what I was going through.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he touched on a wide different array of topics, such as his relationship with Drake, saying, “People hang around your family and be in your house and then they get mad about a beat and send purple demon emojis,” seemingly referring to his tossed off track “Lift Yourself.” But he added, “We’ll reconcile though. We got work to do.”
He also finally answered a question originally posed to him by Jimmy Kimmel, “Does Donald Trump care about Black people?” After a long silence, West responded, “I feel that [Trump] cares about the way black people feel about him, and he would like for black people to like him like they did when he was cool in the rap songs and all this.” Adding, “He will do the things that are necessary to make that happen because he’s got an ego like all the rest of us, and he wants to be the greatest president, and he knows that he can’t be the greatest president without the acceptance of the black community. So it’s something he’s gonna work towards, but we’re gonna have to speak to him.”
Kanye has been spotted out and about in Chicago recently, where fans speculate he might be working on new music with Chance The Rapper. Fingers crossed on that one.
