CUCK
On Kanye West, Pt. XIII
‘Jesus Christ, Hitler, Ye. Sponsor that.’
—Ye, 2023.
“In early 2025,” Ye recently wrote, “I fell into a four-month long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life.” “As the situation became increasingly unsustainable,” he continued, “there were times I didn’t want to be here anymore.”
Enter Cuck, Ye’s unreleased record from early 2025.
Produced and largely written by Dave Blunts between February and May 2025 as Ye expressed his manic, psychotic delusions via a torrent of posts on X, Cuck is his attempt to make a Nazi record with an “antisemitic sound.” The record’s politics largely speak for themselves: the cover features a Klan wedding, photoshopped to feature an interracial couple. Song titles include “Gas Chambers” and “Hitler Ye Jesus.” The chorus of “Heil Hitler” simply repeats “N***a, Heil Hitler,” again and again.
Cuck is an appalling record both politically and aesthetically; it merits analysis only insofar as it reflects the bizarre psychopolitical abyss Ye had entered in early 2025.
As I discuss in my essay on Ye’s Black Nazism, the brand of fascism Ye expressed on Cuck and X blended a variety of typical Nazi signifiers—Hitler worship, swastikas, antisemitism, and so on—with Black liberation politics. For Ye, Black people would only get “off the plantation” through Nazism and antisemitism. In a perverse, warped course of reasoning, Ye had substituted the very real structures of White supremacy that still dominate our anti-Black world for conspiratorial ideas about Jewish control: for him, Black liberation would be achieved not by destroying White supremacy, but by eliminating Jewish influence. With Ta-Nehisi Coates, I argued that this was a symptom of Ye’s bid to become White: to achieve the narcissistic wholeness and freedom of Whiteness denied to Black individuals through what Fanon calls “hallucinatory whitening,” a becoming-White in fantasy. But structurally prohibited from achieving this Whiteness, whether through artistic success, black radicalism, wealth, right-wing political action, or religious devotion—respectively, the underlying projects of Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus, The Life of Pablo, Ye, and Jesus Is King—Ye engaged in a process of splitting and projection, cordoning off a portion of Whiteness (Jewishness) that he could denigrate and destroy, enabling him to identify with the purified racial remainder (Jesus and Hitler) and achieve the self-esteem and liberty he sought.
Misogyny played an equally important role in Ye’s Black Nazism, allowing him to achieve a specifically masculine Whiteness, whose sexual domination of White women further secured his self-esteem. The libidinal extremes of both Vultures records and this period in general are expressed lyrically in a continuous return to scenes of heterosexual domination. Bianca Censori was Ye’s object of choice for this sadistic play in real life: recall her blank, interiorless objectification on the 2025 Grammy red carpet.
In his manic and psychotic state, Ye also managed to redirect his desires for death. In his interview with DJ Akademiks, Ye said he had become “evil,” signifying an embrace of all the lustful, destructive impulses he had denied during his allegedly ascetic Christian period, which ended with his failure to mourn his mother. On March 18th, Kanye posted on X that ‘i thought about killing myself at least once a month ever since my mama was killed in her surgery i always blamed myself.” As he recorded Cuck, however, something had changed: ‘this past five weeks have been the first time i havent wanted to kill myself since my mama died.’ Some of his suicidality was parlayed into murderous fantasies aimed at Jewish people and aggression aimed at women; some of it was translated into persecutory fantasies, largely about being murdered by Black men like Jay-Z—a typically White fantasy recently expressed by Timothee Chalamet, who interviewed Kendrick Lamar during his 2024 rap beef with Drake. As Chalamet said: “I was like, ‘Wow, he’s in the middle of this beef.” Could you imagine if this is how I go out? Actor Timothée Chalamet murdered.’”1
But in this period of what Winnicott called the “organised chaos” of psychosis, Ye revealed something about himself that is far more interesting than these garbled political beliefs. On the song “COUSINS,” Ye confesses that he had an incestuous relationship with a younger male relative for several years when they were both adolescents. His verse is unambiguous: “Hangin’ with my cousin, readin’ dirty magazines… we start re-enactin’ everything that we had seen/That’s when I gave my cousin head, gave my cousin head”. The incestuous sexual activity continued for several years until Ye was 14; Ye’s cousins later murdered a pregnant woman when he was aged 17, a crime for which Ye blamed himself because he showed him pornography as a young child.
Childhood sexuality typically results in intense feelings of shame, guilt, and sexual confusion later in life; when it involves homoerotic incest, one’s sexuality is only disturbed more deeply. Though it is likely that this story acts as what Freud calls a “screen memory”, both gesturing towards and shielding from consciousness an earlier, more traumatic moment of sexual trespass, it is nonetheless a shocking admission about his early family life, sexual history, and his most deeply hidden memories.
Both in “COUSINS” and in posts on X, Ye repeatedly denied his homosexuality. Despite his sexual acts with his cousin, he maintains he is not gay. This denial, which suggests that Ye has not reckoned with what this memory means for his sexuality at all, is crucial to fascism. Fascist men, Sue Grand writes in her article on fascism and perversion, “can do anything except have sex with a man.” Fascism promises a kind of constrained libidinal freedom: identified with the ideals of fascism like Whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality, we can ‘hate, fight, kill and rape’ as we please, says Žižek. What Alberto Toscano calls “fascist freedom” however, does not and cannot include actions that would undermine White, phallic power. The fascist man cannot be gay. Not even Ye, whose Nazism expresses nothing more clearly than a desire for untrammelled freedom, alloyed with an irascible urge for self-annihilation.
→ Part XIV
Footnotes
https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/jose-martinez/timothee-chalamet-jokes-about-kendrick-lamar-interview-amid-drake-beef