Kanye Gave Twitter an Exclusive Hit Single

One of the year’s most talked-about new songs, from one of the planet’s most influential musicians, is not available on Spotify, or Apple Music, or YouTube—not officially, anyway, although unauthorized YouTube versions have appeared and disappeared. (“​​We removed the content and will continue to take down reuploads,” a YouTube spokesperson told NBC News.) The artist is Kanye West, also known as Ye, who for a quarter century has roiled and revolutionized the music world. And the track, which West teased last month, and released in full last week, has a title that reads like a bad joke, or perhaps something worse than that: “Heil Hitler.”

One reasonable reaction to a provocation such as this is to follow the lead of the music-streaming companies—just ignore it. But West has spent decades demanding attention, and often justifying it. His discography includes some of the greatest and most confounding hip-hop music ever made, full of swift mood changes and uneasy juxtapositions. (On his funny and wistful 2004 début album, “The College Dropout,” he turned a reminiscence about a near-fatal car accident into a crude sexual command: “If I could go through all that and still be breathing / Bitch, bend over, I’m here for a reason.”) Around 2018, the year he released an album called “Ye,” West’s story grew more unsettled, and more unsettling. That album cover depicted a mountain range and a stark handwritten message: “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome.” It began with a grim, half-spoken track titled “I Thought About Killing You”; some fans wondered if the lyrics were about his wife, Kim Kardashian, who would divorce him four years later. In the period after “Ye,” West reinvented himself as a gospel singer, a Presidential candidate, an on-and-off supporter of President Donald Trump. More recently, he has become increasingly obsessed with Jews (in 2022, he tweeted, “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”), and with Nazis. During this year’s Super Bowl, he paid for a TV advertisement that led viewers to a website that sold a swastika T-shirt.

No doubt all of this has cost West many fans, in addition to his lucrative partnerships with Adidas, Gap, and Balenciaga, all of which severed ties with him in 2022. But it has not cost him his celebrity. Even now, and without the benefit of streams of his new song, West is listed on Spotify as the twenty-eighth most listened-to musician in the world. And listeners quickly discovered that the most reliable place to hear West’s new song was on Twitter, which has grown notably more anarchic since its purchase, in 2022, by Elon Musk, who renamed it X. In the past week, West has given the platform a kind of exclusive hit single—a song that can be heard almost nowhere else.

Many people will be eager to avoid “Heil Hitler,” but those who want to experience it should probably watch the music video, which West shared on X. There is an ominous brass fanfare, and we see a cadre of shirtless Black men under blue lights wearing animal pelts, as if massing for an attack. West’s verse begins not with a snarl but with whimpering falsetto. “Man, these people took my kids from me, then they closed my bank account / I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out,” he raps, or, rather, sings. West is not nearly as funny as he used to be, and much more anguished, which helps explain why, on his scattershot recent albums, he has been much more effective as a singer than a rapper.

In the verse, West is a mess: drug-addled (“Where the fuck’s my nitrous?”), estranged, alone. “So I became a Nazi—yeah, bitch, I’m the villain,” he warbles, extending the last syllable as the music deserts him. Then a sudden switch: a bellicose, spine-stiffening bass line, and the instantly infamous refrain. It is a hook that has been stuck in my head ever since I first heard it—and in this case the coercive connotation of the word “hook” is entirely appropriate. A chorus of male voices delivers the words, and the tone is deeper and more commanding, more menacing. (Decades ago, at the dawn of his career, West rapped about being self-conscious about the way he sounded: “They used to tell me, ‘Toughen up, put some bass in your voice.’ ”) The men in the video are lip-synching, too, linking their faces and bodies to a three-word phrase that is about as perverse as any refrain ever set to music: “Nigga, heil Hitler!” Even printing those three words is a good way to start a fight—people will disagree about which, if any of them, should be censored. The song ends with a snippet of a Hitler speech from 1935. (To make sure listeners got the point, West posted a translation on his X account.) The whole thing lasts less than three minutes, though you may find that it lingers in your brain for far longer than that.

I have long been suspicious of the idea of music as a guilty pleasure, as if it were possible for us to divide our favorite songs into two categories, worthy and unworthy. But I’m suspicious, too, of the idea of guiltless pleasure: the certainty that there will never be any conflict between what we like and what we would like to like. We can certainly decide not to engage with music that glorifies the Third Reich, as this track obviously does. But observing this sort of cultural boycott is not the same as arguing that such music can’t be compelling—on the contrary, if a song like “Heil Hitler” weren’t in some way compelling, there would be no urgent argument to ignore it.

One reason to pay attention is that West has long been a political figure. In 2005, during a televised concert to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina, he declared, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”; in those less vituperative times, this was considered a shocking breach of etiquette, and seemed to mark him as an ally of Democrats. Years later, his intermittent support of Trump made him seem like a Republican, and in October, 2022, the Twitter account of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans tweeted a statement of loyalty: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” (Two months later, as West was increasingly ranting about Hitler, the committee deleted the post.) Part of what makes West’s song menacing is the sense that he knows what he is doing, and that he is part of a movement. But part of what makes it menacing, too, is the sense that West is unpredictable and unhinged. Some of his most disturbing public statements have been about his ex-wife and children. Listening to him is an especially uncomfortable experience because of the sense that he might be struggling—as he once suggested he was—with mental illness. There is no simple way that we, the public, can proactively grant privacy to an extremely public figure, even one as troubled as West.

West’s song didn’t appear on the usual pop charts, but it did spread the way pop songs often do, by generating reactions online. There was plenty of shock and disgust—and enthusiasm, too, from figures who shared West’s fascination with Hitler, or antipathy for Jews. Nick Fuentes, the anti-Jewish influencer who once had dinner with West and Trump, said, “That’s the song of the year—calling it now.” A white couple filmed themselves driving around, grinning and Sieg-Heiling to the music; outraged viewers worked to expose their identities. An irreverent podcaster posted his own rendition, writing, “This better be the first ukulele cover of Heil Hitler.” West himself reposted an emo-fied recording of it. And a range of seemingly A.I.-generated versions began to spread, all with that incendiary refrain uncensored: a jaunty bluegrass version, a peppy Motown version, a version that evoked a barbershop quartet. In the late twenty-tens, there was an energetic effort to police the bounds of acceptable speech, and a growing consensus that non-Black people should never utter the N-word. But the rise of A.I. content makes this taboo harder to enforce: there is no easy way to separate a satirical A.I. rendition from a sympathetic one, and no way, in any case, to punish a nonexistent singer for singing an offensive phrase. When we argue over provocative music, we are often arguing about what we think the musician meant to say, but of course A.I. algorithms don’t “mean” anything at all. An A.I. rendition of “Heil Hitler” is totally offensive, but also totally blank—an eerie combination, and perhaps a novel one.

Lots of hip-hop tracks are meant to evoke the woozy dissociation of opioid use, but this one evokes, instead, the not-quite-pleasurable derangement of disappearing down a social-media rabbit hole. It is no coincidence that West rhymes the phrase “Heil Hitler” with a complaint that is really a confession: “They don’t understand the things I say on Twitter.” He is summoning a chaotic world where “Hitler” rhymes with “Twitter”—our world, or at least it sometimes seems that way. In recent years, one pervasive worry was that censorious social-media companies would ban and silence anyone who stepped out of line. But we now live in an era when a top musician can distribute a song called “Heil Hitler,” and there’s no way to stop him. That is the true message of this song, which has spread and thrived beyond the reach of boycotts or shaming campaigns: no one is in charge. ♦