Sporting goods manufacturer Adidas has finally pulled the ripcord and ended its collaboration with Kanye West. The US rapper had recently attracted attention several times with anti-Semitic hate speech. A step in the right direction, which unfortunately comes much too late!
Recently, in particular, the debate has often been rekindled as to how difficult it is to distinguish between people as artists and as private individuals. Actors who play superheroes can, of course, be people in their private lives that nobody wants to have anything to do with more than necessary. Many celebrities are considered difficult. And it is often emphasized in these debates that one must decouple an artist's work from the private individual and not allow any personal antipathies to interfere with criticism.
Stanley Kubrick, for example, was a gifted director, but privately he is said to have been an oddball: to put it bluntly, many well-known artists not only have a screw loose, but an entire arsenal of screws. Since the allegations against Hollywood star Kevin Spacey, for example, whom millions of viewers admired for his role as Francis Underwood in "House of Cards", it is also known about the 63-year-old that he is anything but a fine guy in real life target.
And when, after decades, the well-kept secrets of Michael Jackson - the King of Pop, who died in 2009 - caused a sensation, it wasn't just a punch in the pit of his stomach for his fans. It's incredibly difficult to separate the artist from his work. A lot of people can't stand a single song by Michael Jackson anymore. And so are more and more people now with the music of rapper Kanye West.
It's often said that a bad boy image is part and parcel of a rapper. They pose with diamonds in their ears and five kilos of gold jewelery around their necks in front of expensive sledges, they provoke with their texts and sometimes wave a gun around. And as fame grows, so does character. A number of artists who have once smelled great success often find themselves in free fall from this point. And even with Kanye West, at the latest after his disgusting attack of arrogance towards singer Taylor Swift at the MTV Awards in 2009, you only had to sit back and watch the musician dismantle himself a little more every year.
At that time, he stormed onto the stage in the middle of the award ceremony for the now 32-year-old in the "Video" category and had babbled that one of the best videos of all time was not by Swift but by Beyoncé. Not to mention the rudeness of depriving someone of their moment of joy like that. Even if you were to turn a blind eye: West's behavior, which even called Swift a "bitch", was no longer a faux pas even then.
But as it is, people who are famous have power and influence. Not infrequently, they think they can do anything. After all, they can afford the most expensive lawyers in the world. And often enough they get away with their disgusting behavior - unfortunately. It didn't change anything about the bully rapper that even then-US President Barack Obama called him an idiot.
It would take many more years, accompanied by a number of verbal gaffes, until the ripcord was finally pulled and Kim Kardashian's ex-husband put in his place. One could say: better late than never. But that would be naïve, because, as always, it's about money. Otherwise, the sporting goods manufacturer Adidas, for which the rapper worked as a designer, would certainly have pulled the ripcord earlier. Instead, he was allowed to do so, even when he provoked a "White Lives Matter" shirt at Paris Fashion Week and repeatedly outraged social media with anti-Semitic statements. Nothing about it is, to put it bluntly, "Promotion Brutal". Statements like: "I can say anti-Semitic things and Adidas can't let me down" are clumsy, embarrassing and oblivious to history.
Finally, but basically much too late, several business partners have separated from the rapper and ended the collaboration. It was also unpleasant for the “Drink Champs” podcast, which is extremely popular in the USA and in which the disgusting statements were made. Only after a storm of criticism was West's misanthropic stupidity cut out of the episode. It's even offline at the moment. The podcast hosts regret not standing up to West the moment he verbally escalated yet again. They say it's "embarrassing" for them, but maybe they were just as perplexed as the listeners at that moment that they were simply speechless.
None of the anti-Semitic rabble uttered by the Trump supporter should be reproduced here, because it is as Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews, says: "The rapper's daily new anti-Semitic outbursts are for the Jews unbearable in Germany and all over the world." Sometimes it's not just a question of whether parting with an artist will potentially cost a company millions in lost sales. Sometimes the courage to show megalomaniac loudmouths where the door is is worth more than all the money in the world.
