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Kanye back in Chicago: 5 major takeaways from his hometown visit
It’s no secret that Kanye claims his hometown of Chicago or that he tributes his influence and success to the midwest city of wind.
You can point to the song “Homecoming” featuring Chris Martin, Donda’s House, an organization that focuses on the creative youth in Chicago, or the name of his youngest child, who was named after the city itself — his affinity for the city is prominent.
However, the Atlanta born and now Calabasas, California resident hasn’t been home and has received a tremendous amount of flack for his absence. But Kanye has returned.
Early this week Kanye came back to Chicago to work alongside Chance the Rapper on his upcoming album and even gave a pair of transparent interviews to longtime Chi-town radio staples 107.5 WGCI Chicago.
In the interview, he spoke on a wide range of topics from the city to Trump and even Drake. From the interview, and from his time in Chicago in general, we’ve combed over and gotten the five major gems from his time.
Here they are:
Kanye reunites with former manager
Back in April of this year, Billboard reported that Kanye split with his longtime manager, Izvor “Izzy” Zivkovic, leading to a later tweet that he had parted ways with co-manager Scooter Braun as well.
To this day we’ll never know if that string of tweets was Kanye being Kanye or if it was a marketing ploy for the release of his album Ye — either way, he was clearly shaking up his inner circle.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989142253468708864
Now, Ye is reassembling the team around him.
In his 107.5 WGCI Chicago interview Wednesday, he announced that he was reuniting with another former longtime manager, John Monopoly, who worked closely with him for the first decade of his career and who served as his manager through his first three albums
Big news: John Monopoly is managing Kanye again…
He was Kanye's first manager starting back in the 90s, and they've been on a 10 year hiatus
Congrats Monop!
— Andrew Barber (@fakeshoredrive) August 29, 2018
Kanye apologizes
If you remember earlier this Summer, Kanye made huge waves when, in defending his support, Donald Trump at TMZ headquarters that slavery was a choice.
During his visit to Chicago and the radio program WGCI he did his best efforts to apologize and backtrack those comments. He said to Chicago’s WGCI-FM on Wednesday,
“I don’t know if I properly apologized for how that slave comment made people feel. So I want to take this moment right now to say … I’m sorry for people who felt let down by that moment.”
Kanye Addresses Drake
One of the highlights of this summer was the Pusha T and Drake beef.
In the midst of that beef was Kanye, who many had felt fed Pusha T the sensitive information about Drake’s hidden child since he and Drake had been working closely together on music at the time.
Well, he addressed that, too, straight up saying:
“No, I didn’t. “Don’t pull me into this conversation. I got major things to do other than telling [Pusha-T] some information about Drake. I honestly don’t care that much.”
He went on to speak on his relationship about his relationship with Drizzy and the future that may or may not lie there. West explained,
“People be around your family and be in your house and this and that, then they get mad about a beat and send purple demon emojis. I don’t play like that, I don’t play in that place. It’s like, look, it ain’t no beef. We’ll reconcile that one day because we got to. We got work to do because these voices are just too powerful.”
Mind you we’re not even one month removed from Drake dissing Kanye when his tour stopped through Chicago.
yooo @IamAkademiks drake switch the lines in “Know Yourself” and said KANYE FLOPPED pic.twitter.com/dYKQzXGwVV
— Erickkkkk (@Over_Random) August 18, 2018
Kanye still loves Trump
This is wild. The city still shuts down when Ye comes out. pic.twitter.com/wpgrwoon7F
— Andrew Barber (@fakeshoredrive) August 29, 2018
As Ye was leaving the interview, he managed to get hit with a question asking if he shared the same feelings for Trump as Trump did he, who, a few weeks ago, said he was fond of the Chicago legend.
His response: “I like him too.”
Whichever sunken place we thought Ye was in, he still resides there.
Kanye and Chance are working on music
This is actually no surprise.
The Coloring Book artist and Chicago hometown hero made mention of Kanye coming to Chicago to help him with his album back in June, but it seemed a bit more real when Kanye showed footage of them vibing out to a chopped up Michael Jackson sample.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1035162914900996096
“We had to chop this up for Michael’s birthday,” West wrote on Twitter.
Only time will tell what other ways Chicago will influence Kanye or if his views on Trump will ever change. At the very least we can expect a Kanye-produced Chance album. How bad could that be?