Kanye wants to put the surgeon who performed his mother's fatal surgery on his next album cover
We’ve been through a number of KanyeStorms—the brief but exhaustingly energetic bouts of attention-seeking behaviors, new music, outright trolling, and occasional pure marketing savvy that rapper Kanye West shifts into whenever he’s got something big coming up to promote—at this point, enough to know they each have their own individual rhythms. The run up to 2016's The Life Of Pablo was focused on obsessive, fiddly perfectionism, for instance—the constant name changes, swapping out track lists left and right, continuing to tinker with the album’s content well after its official release—while West’s current burst of energy has been significantly more divisive, as he’s apparently embraced a number of elements of the political right, up-to-and-including an ongoing flirtation with similarly braggadocious asshole Donald Trump.
But a KanyeStorm never comes in a single emotional tone, something West exemplified yesterday, when he released two very different songs onto the internet: “Lift Yourself,” an obvious troll track in which he mocked critics by rapping literal nonsense, and the far more reflective “Ye Vs. The People,” in which West allowed his current “Don’t tell me what to think” persona to be called out with lines from his friend T.I., rapping about all the harm West’s support of Trump could do. Today, though, West appears to have moved into a stranger, more melancholy headspace still, announcing what he says will be the image on the cover of his upcoming, still untitled album: A picture of Jan Adams, the surgeon who performed the operations that led to the death of West’s mother, Donda.