John Legend didn’t anticipate Kanye West’s “descent.”
The 2 artists used to have a powerful private {and professional} relationship after they started working collectively on music within the early 2000s. Nevertheless, the 2 have since gone their separate methods, and Legend admitted in a Saturday profile with The Instances that “it does really feel unhappy, generally surprising, to see the place [West] is now.”
“Again then Kanye was very passionate, very gifted, and he had huge desires not just for himself but in addition for all of the individuals round him,” the 13-time Grammy Award winner recalled of his time working with West. “He had a lot optimism, a lot creativity… I didn’t see a touch of what we’re seeing now, his obsessions with antisemitism, anti-Blackness, and it’s unhappy to see his devolution.”
Legend added that whereas he doesn’t “suppose we’re certified to psychoanalyze him,” he started noticing a “distinction” within the “Stronger” rapper after the dying of his mom in 2007. “His descent began then and appears to have accelerated not too long ago,” he stated.
Despite the fact that they aren’t shut anymore, partly due to West’s assist of Donald Trump, Legend acknowledged his affect on the trajectory of his profession as an artist who had beforehand “been turned down by labels all over the place.”
“Kanye blew up after producing Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint in 2001,” he stated. “Then he skilled a buzz as a solo artist and the entire time I used to be travelling with him, doing reveals with him, getting publicity not solely as his singer and keyboard participant but in addition as an artist myself. I had been turned down by labels all over the place. Then The Faculty Dropout offered 400,000 copies in its first week, everybody wished to know what was taking place in our camp.”
Legend added, “All these individuals who turned me down all of a sudden determined that my music sounded rather a lot higher than it did the primary time spherical.”
Lately, West’s profession has taken a flip as he has continued to make aggressive antisemitic and pro-Nazi remarks. Most not too long ago, he made headlines after firing off controversial and antisemitic tweets, together with praising Adolf Hitler, figuring out as a Nazi, selling a Yeezy T-shirt design with a swastika, denouncing the #MeToo motion and reigniting his controversial feedback on slavery.
