\n<\/p>\n
Adidas severed ties<\/a> with him. His talent agency dropped him<\/a>. But on Friday night, an arena on Long Island was filled with thousands of people who most certainly had not turned their backs on Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.<\/p>\n Shortly before releasing \u201cVultures 1,\u201d<\/a> his first album since making a string of antisemitic remarks that cost him business deals and drew widespread condemnation, Ye previewed his new collaboration with the R&B singer Ty Dolla Sign at a listening party at UBS Arena, further testing the boundaries of his fandom with lyrics that did not tiptoe around the controversy.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Crazy, bipolar, antisemite,\u2019 and I\u2019m still the king,\u201d Ye raps in \u201cKing,\u201d the final song on the LP, which drew a modest wave of cheers.<\/p>\n Ty Dolla Sign and Ye appeared a bit before 11 p.m. on a smoke-filled stage \u2014 at least, that was the impression, though it was hard to confirm who was there. Wearing a full mask, the rapper, designer and longtime provocateur never showed his face as he exulted in his new music, which included samples from Donna Summer\u2019s \u201cI Feel Love\u201d and the Backstreet Boys (\u201cYeezy\u2019s back, all right!\u201d).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Originally slated to come out in December, delays and false starts pushed the release of \u201cVultures 1\u201d to early Saturday morning, soon after the hourlong listening party had ended.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As those who showed up for Ye on Friday know, patience is a central tenet of being a fan of the rapper.<\/p>\n In recent years, as Ye\u2019s behavior has careened from erratic to extreme, loyal listeners have also had to grapple with the controversial things he has done, including wearing a shirt that read \u201cWhite Lives Matter\u201d at Paris Fashion Week,<\/a> posting on Twitter (now X) that he would go \u201cdeath con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE\u201d and repeatedly accusing \u201cJewish media\u201d<\/a> and \u201cJewish Zionists\u201d of feeding a paparazzi frenzy and canceling his shows.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had to explain myself to a lot of people,\u201d said Markus Phillips, 18, listing his Jewish friends and his \u201cfriends who listen to Taylor Swift\u201d among those wondering why he has remained a fan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI don\u2019t support everything that he does outside of the music, but I still acknowledge how much of a generational artist he is,\u201d said Phillips, who had driven down from Buffalo with his friends that day for the event.<\/p>\n In a crowd that skewed toward Gen Z, the fans who paid $140 and up for the listening party included those who professed to be thoroughly unbothered by Ye\u2019s actions \u2014 \u201cDoesn\u2019t affect me,\u201d one 18-year-old from New Jersey said with a shrug \u2014 and those who were struggling to reconcile the artist they have loved since his first studio album, \u201cThe College Dropout,\u201d with the one who said \u201cI do love Hitler\u201d on a talk show with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIs he saying it because he means it, or is he saying it because he just likes to be controversial?\u201d asked Jack Urig, a 20-year-old waiter from New Jersey who was wearing a lavender hoodie that he received for donating to Ye\u2019s 2020 presidential campaign as a teenager.<\/p>\n \u201cSeparating the art from the artist\u201d was a common refrain among those who lined up before doors opened, as were speculations about the role that mental health played in Ye\u2019s behavior. (He has said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder<\/a>.) Some preferred to believe that it was all a performance or some sort of attention-grabbing marketing ploy, pointing to his statement of apology to the Jewish community \u2014 posted in Hebrew \u2014 that was released late last year<\/a>, as he was preparing to drop new music.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt was not my intention to offend or demean, and I deeply regret any pain I may have caused,\u201d Ye said in the post, writing that he was \u201ccommitted to starting with myself and learning from this experience to ensure greater sensitivity and understanding in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n The lyrics in the new album hardly communicate the same kind of contrition. In the song \u201cStars,\u201d<\/a> he raps that he keeps \u201ca few Jews on the staff now.\u201d An infamous line from \u201cVultures,\u201d<\/a> the track he released last year in which he raps that he can\u2019t be antisemitic if he had sex with a Jewish woman, was one of the best known in the arena. The music cut out for the verse so the crowd could shout it themselves.<\/p>\n In an album that encompasses gospel-infused house, R&B and trap, Ye features a long panel of collaborators, including Quavo, Playboi Carti, Chris Brown, Lil Durk and for one verse, Ye\u2019s daughter North West, who appeared at the first listening party in Chicago on Thursday. Ye\u2019s verses often confront the drama over his reputation over the past few years, presenting himself as emerging triumphant despite his detractors. (\u201cI burned eight billion to take off my chains,\u201d he raps in \u201cBurn.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Whether or not the mainstream music industry will be willing to recognize Ye\u2019s new music remains a question. Even before the antisemitic remarks that lost him lucrative fashion deals with Adidas, Gap and Balenciaga, the Grammys had dropped Ye as a performer<\/a> for the 2022 award show, citing his erratic and troubling public behavior, which, at the time, included the release of an animated music video<\/a> that portrayed the kidnapping and burial of a figure who looked a lot like Pete Davidson, the comedian who had been dating Kim Kardashian, Ye\u2019s former wife.<\/p>\n At the arena on Friday, many fans said they found it hard to disentangle Ye from the musical nostalgia of their childhoods \u2014 and from their closets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Wearing Yeezy sneakers to the show, Mahatub Ahmed, 27, said he had 11 more pairs at home, and asked, \u201cWhat do they want me to do? Throw them away, burn them?\u201d Friends and family have wondered why he doesn\u2019t change his social media handles that play on \u201cYeezus,\u201d the name of the rapper\u2019s sixth solo album, but he rebuffs them.<\/p>\n For Shareef Rashid, 47 \u2014 who attended with his 13-year-old son Jair, a much newer fan \u2014 his relationship with Ye is largely steeped in the past. He said he was first drawn to Ye\u2019s 2007 album \u201cGraduation,\u201d with its creative soul samples and lyrics that resonated with him as a young, middle-class Black man of roughly the same age as Ye.<\/p>\n A rapper himself in his free time, Rashid recently posted a snippet of a song in which he says he misses \u201cthe first four Kanyes,\u201d and raps of the star: \u201cPut America on blast with everything you say\/Now you just talk because and it don\u2019t feel the same way\/I hope you are OK.\u201d<\/p>\n But there will always be a segment of Ye\u2019s fan base for which the calculus is much simpler: Whatever he says, whatever he does, they will stand by him.<\/p>\n Waiting in line to buy merch, Kiara Fuller, 23, who considers herself a dedicated Ye fan, wondered aloud whether the person behind the mask onstage that night would be, in fact, Ye.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were on the way here and I was thinking, wouldn\u2019t it be the funniest prank if it wasn\u2019t even him out there, and he just has a random person doing it?\u201d she said in a gaggle of her friends.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After traveling past the outskirts of Queens and waiting hours for a problematic fave<\/a>, wouldn\u2019t such a stunt be the final indignity?<\/p>\n \u201cEh,\u201d Fuller said and shrugged, \u201cjust got to see it through.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n