Kanye West’s Wireless appearance courts controversy, and for good reason

Did the team behind the Wireless music festival cynically bank on a storm of public dissent when they confirmed Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, as their headline act over three nights in Finsbury Park this summer? If so, they were right.

Yesterday, the mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, joined many British voices decrying the American rapper, calling his antisemitic outbursts “offensive and wrong”. Khan added that the 48-year-old performer’s recently expressed views were “simply not reflective” of the shared values of the city. But he left responsibility for withdrawing the invitation with the festival’s organisers, Live Nation and its subsidiary, Festival Republic.

While the event is a private commercial venture, sponsored by Pepsi Max and PayPal, it will take place in a public space hired from Haringey council.

The Liberal Democrat opposition leader on the council, Luke Cawley-Harrison, is among those asking Haringey and the Wireless management team to think again. ”It is completely inappropriate and unacceptable for anyone with a track record of praising Adolf Hitler and declaring themselves a Nazi to be given a platform to perform – especially in a publicly owned park,” he said.

The leader of the largest body representing Jews in Britain, the Jewish Leadership Council, is also calling on the government to stop West from appearing. It called the booking “deeply irresponsible” and cited the record levels of antisemitism reported in the capital, including the arson attack last month on charity ambulances in a synagogue car park in Golders Green. A spokesperson said of West: “His most recent apology must be considered in the context that he went on to sell swastika T-shirts and release a song called Heil Hitler after apologising previously.”

Last night in Los Angeles West took to a stage for the first time in five years. Wearing a mask to sing tracks from his 13 solo albums, he streamed live to fans and performed to a stadium crowd who had paid between $125 and $595 a ticket. The show opened on the Jewish festival of Passover and has caused alarm in that community. “Unless Ye is planning to use his concert to apologise, heal wounds, and disavow antisemitism, everyone who attends is supporting and normalizing anti-Jewish racism,” Sam Yebri, a former city council candidate and Jewish advocate, told The California Post.

In an apparently unconnected move, the British singer and producer James Blake has asked to be removed from the production credits on West’s latest album, Bully, released on Friday. The track This One Here was originally attributed to co-writers Blake, Don Toliver and Quentin Miller, alongside West himself. Blake, 37, claims “the spirit” of his original work is “mostly absent” in the song, explaining on his streaming platform, Vault: “The way I pitched his vocals and construed the track from his freestyle is partially there, majorly peppered with other newer vocal takes etc… But the spirit of my actual production is mostly absent other than that.”

Blake said his decision was “not personal”, adding: “I don’t want to take credit for other people’s work and this version isn’t what I created with Ye.” The two musicians have worked together on other projects for over a decade, collaborating in 2022 on the unreleased recording WAR.

Criticism of Wireless so far centres on the decision to give West a public platform in London after his string of offensive public statements. But the morality of promoting a headline performer who has suffered such a recent and dramatic crisis in mental health must surely also be in doubt.

Before the release of the new studio album, his first since 2024, West took out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal. It took the form of an open letter of apology for his use of the swastika symbol, as well as for his apparently approving statements about the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Under the heading “To Those I’ve Hurt”, West wrote that he was not expecting “sympathy or a free pass” and wanted to earn public forgiveness. He said he had been diagnosed as bipolar following a car crash 25 years ago and had since experienced periods of uncontrolled behaviour. "In that fractured state [of his bipolar diagnosis],” he wrote, “I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it. One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 are the disconnected moments, many of which I still cannot recall, that lead to poor judgment and reckless behaviour that (often) feels like an out-of-body experience."

West is a former donor to the Democratic presidential campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but switched to backing Donald Trump in 2018 and then launched his own short-lived bid for office in 2020. His controversial views in recent years about abortion, capital punishment and welfare provision led to him being dropped from deals and sponsorships with Vogue, Balenciaga, Gap and Adidas.

It is hard to imagine the festival programmers believed the rapper’s apology would be readily accepted in London. Even if they had that hope, a key question remains: why did it seem a good idea to take such a risk with a performer who has so recently endured serious mental health struggles? The ethics of selling tickets based on a notoriety that is now partly built on causing offence is dubious too. And what duty of care is there either to West’s potential audience, or to an artist who has said he cannot always be held responsible for his actions?

When the world is a tinder box, there is no need to salute an artist who has used hateful language. It does not seem like a freedom of expression issue. More like an absence of civil responsibility.

The Observer has requested a response from Live Nation but has not yet heard back.

Photograph by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images