Kanye West answers questions from Sr. pastor Joel Osteen during the 11 am service at Lakewood Church on Nov. 17, 2019, in Houston.
AP Photo/Michael WykeYe is starting fresh. Followers of the artist formerly known as Kanye West were in for a surprise on Monday (Nov. 29) when the rapper’s Instagram was scrubbed clean of all photos.
Whether Ye had deleted or simply archived all of his posts was unclear, but the 9.5 million users who follow him were greeted with the message “No posts yet” on a stark white background to correspond with his blank, black profile photo.
Of course, Ye has always had a famously tempestuous relationship to social media – though it’s typically his Twitter account that gets deactivated and revived on a somewhat regular basis. In recent days, the “Praise God” rapper had used his Instagram Stories to continue his public plea to reconcile with estranged wife Kim Kardashian through a publicly broadcast Thanksgiving prayer. (“All I think about every day is how I get my family back together,” he said in the video.)
He also mourned the death of Virgil Abloh over the weekend by sharing a Sunday Service Choir performance of Adele’s latest No. 1 hit “Easy on Me” dedicated to the memory of his late friend.
Ye’s decision to wipe his social slate clean comes on the heels of his latest spate of Grammy nominations. While his long-gestating 2021 album DONDA was reportedly a late addition to the album of the year race alongside rival Taylor Swift’s Evermore, the rapper also received additional nods for best melodic rap performance (for “Hurricane” featuring The Weeknd and Lil Baby), best rap song (for “Jail” featuring Jay-Z), and best rap album. (He’s also listed as a songwriter on Lil Nas X’s fellow album of the year nominee MONTERO.)
NEWS
No matter what you thought of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake battle, there was only one undisputed winner by the end of it all: the reaction community in the worlds of streaming and YouTube. Your favorite content creators broke down the bars, reacted to all the most shocking moments, and helped this showdown become one of hip-hop's most culturally significant and resonant moments in a long time... For better or worse. See, the battle's technically not over yet, but only because the 6ix God's idea of victory is clearly quite different. In his federal defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group – his label – for releasing K.Dot's "Not Like Us," he named various content creators who allegedly helped boost the track's widespread popularity and, as a result, its supposedly defamatory nature.
Furthermore, the specific allegation that Drake brings up in this highly controversial lawsuit is that UMG "whitelisted" copyright claims for YouTubers, streamers, etc. concerning "Not Like Us." This means that they would be able to monetize their content without facing a copyright claim from UMG over "Not Like Us," and this isn't really an allegation because various creators have backed this up. But a few important (alleged) caveats that people are talking about online need to be clear. First, "whitelisting" supposedly happens on behalf of a record label behind a song like the West Coast banger, and UMG is instead the distributor of that track. Secondly, as rapper and online personality ScruFaceJean brings up as seen in the post below, tracks like "Push Ups" were also "whitelisted" by its team.
Along with Jean, many other of your favorite content creators spoke out against this Drake lawsuit. Zias! and B.Lou, for example, spoke with their lawyer about the possibility of countersuing for emotional distress, as they found the Toronto superstar's accusations and his implication of them very disturbing and misguided. NoLifeShaq also dragged The Boy through the mud, calling him "soft" and positing that, whether "whitelisting" happened or not, they would react to "Not Like Us" accordingly as they did to his own tracks.
In addition, it's important to bring up that many others fans have pointed to how Drake excitedly used streamers to generate hype and reaction clips for his own diss tracks against Kendrick Lamar. The most direct example is with Kai Cenat, whom he texted to "stay on stream" before dropping "Family Matters." Ironically, the Twitch giant appears in this clowned-upon defamation lawsuit as an example of what the OVO mogul's accusations and implications are. And one more thing: there is no direct link between monetization and algorithmic boosting on sites like YouTube. With all this in mind, content creators seem to feel almost insulted at the idea that they only reacted to the two biggest rappers in the world beefing with each other because one of them would allow them to make money. If Drizzy knew the first thing about the reaction community, maybe he wouldn't have included this...
