The British Kanye West
On the downfall of grime Godfather Wiley
In late February of this year, news broke out that the legendary UK rapper and producer Wiley (real name Richard Kylea Cowie Jr.) was stripped of his MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) honor. He received this honor in 2018 ‘for services to Music’, in recognition of his key contribution in the creation of grime - a subgenre of British music that combines electronic and hip hop. In the previous year, Wiley released his eleventh album Godfather, alluding to his honorific as ‘Godfather of Grime’. If one wishes to know that grime sounds like, as well as a taste of Wiley’s musical brilliance, then this album should provide a good start.
But this essay will not be focusing on his music. Instead, it will comment on the reason why he was stripped of his MBE honor: his persistent and unrepentant pattern of public antisemitism. The pattern started in 2020, when he was deleted from Facebook and Instagram following an anti-semitic tirade on Twitter. This caught the attention of then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, who called his remarks ‘abhorrent’. In the following year, his suspension from Instagram and Twitter was made permanent.
The sad and tragic downfall of one of hip-hop’s greatest figures mirror that of another - Kanye West. This parallel is made more eerie given that both artists released their debut albums in the year - Wiley’s Treddin’ on Thin Ice and Kanye West’s The College Dropout were both released in 2004, which two months of each other. Both albums were critically acclaimed, and both set the path for hip-hop music in the years forward.
Rather than another tired treatment of ‘separating the art from the artist’, I would like to examine why and how Wiley, like Kanye, chose to sacrifice his illustrious career on the wretched altar of antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred.
“I just think that’s what they’re about, is making money,” said Kanye West in an interview with Tucker Carlson when referencing Jared Kushner, Former Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump. Another remark, which was edited out of the interview, was: “I prefer my kids knew Hannukah from Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering.” The theme of greed and financial manipulation is an age-old trope of Jew-hatred, and Kanye bought it hook, line and sinker.
Wiley also exhibited this pernicious pattern of bigotry in his Twitter outburst of 2020: “If you work for a company owned by 2 Jewish men and you challenge the Jewish community in anyway of course you will get fired.”
According to the American Jewish Committee:
The theme of greed in antisemitic rhetoric is so widespread that it’s led to a long list of Jewish stereotypes, including being excessively materialistic and money-oriented, exploiting others for personal gain, being overly wealthy, and controlling the world’s finances.
What’s worse is that whatever consequences Kanye and Wiley suffers will be unlikely to disprove them of their prejudices. To them, it will be construed as a character assassination orchestrated by ‘the Jews’.
The examples of Wiley and Kanye West also shed light on the enduring phenomenon of antisemitism among Westerners of African descent. Black antisemitism, as exemplified by American groups such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites, see the Jewish people not only as treacherous figures, but also oppressive to black people. Another strain of black antisemitic thought posits that black people are the true descendants of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, thus questioning the connection that modern-day Jews have to Judaism and the land of Israel. In rebutting the charge of antisemitism, Kanye said: “I actually can’t be antisemitic because black people are actually Jew also.” Similarly, Wiley echoed this line of thinking in 2020 when he said: “Listen to me Jewish community. Israel is not your country I’m sorry … The Star of David that’s our ting … Some people have gotten too comfortable on lands that don’t belong to them… Israel is ours.”
For black antisemites of American or British origin, the perception of Jews as part of the oppressor class - mainly consisting of whites - complements their shared view that black people are the true descendants of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. In his Twitter tirade, Wiley outrageously compared Jewish people to the Ku Klux Klan:
There are 2 sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish & #KKK but being in business for 20 years you start to undestand [sic] why … Red Necks Are the KKK and Jewish people are the Law...Work that out.
Kanye West, echoing this sentiment, infamously said: “Jewish people have owned the black voice” and “the Jewish community, especially in the music industry…they’ll take us and milk us till we die.”
Decades earlier, in 1967, James Baldwin articulates the black antisemitic view in stark prose:
In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man — for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro's understanding. It increases the Negro's rage.
For the black antisemite, black people despise Jews because Jews prosper despite their historical suffering, while the black population languish in economic and spiritual poverty. In an interview with Bari Weiss, the legendary basketballer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says that this umbrella of beliefs is not only irrational, but self-destructive: “Black people have to know that when they mouth antisemitism, they are using the exact same kind of reasoning that white supremacists use against blacks. They are enabling racism.” The fact that two of the most influential musicians of our time profess this belief is alarming, though hardly surprising. Antisemitism, after all, is a conspiracy theory - rather than getting into the heart of the problem, it explains the problem away using extreme rhetorical flourish and centuries-old bigotry.