True to form, Kanye West had an eventful night when he served as musical guest on the series debut of ‘Saturday Night Live’.
Kanye got things off to a bizarre start when he and Lil Pump performed their track ‘I Love It’ while dressed as a bottle of Perrier and Fiji water respectively, but it was after his final performance of the night that things really took a turn.
Dressed in a Make America Great Again hat, in support for the current POTUS, Kanye began one of the impassioned speeches for which he’s become infamous, once again defending his pro-Donald Trump views, and suggesting he was being “bullied” for his political views.
“They bully me backstage,” he claimed. “They say, ‘don’t go out there with that hat on’. They bully me backstage. They bully me! And then they say I’m in the ‘sunken place’. You wanna see the sunken place? OK. Imma listen to y’all now.
“Imma put my Superman cape on… you can’t tell me what to do. Follow your heart, and stop following your mind. That’s how we’re controlled. That’s how we’re programmed. If you want the world to move forward, try love.”
Criticising the media, Kanye continued: “90 percent of the media is liberal. 90 percent of TV, L.A., New York, writers, rappers, musicians... So it’s easy to make it seem like it’s so, so, so, so one-sided.”
Even after ‘SNL’ pulled the plug on his speech for time reasons, Kanye continued, as revealed on Chris Rock’s Instagram story, who was filming from the audience.
In a clip posted by the comedian, Kanye is heard singing: “I wanna cry right now, black man in America, supposed to keep what you’re feelin’ in side right now…”
“The blacks want always Democrats,” he later continued. “It’s like the plan they did, to take the fathers out the home and put them on welfare… does anybody know about that? That’s a Democratic plan.
“There’s so many times I talk to, like, a white person about this and they say, ‘How could you like Trump? He’s racist.’ Well, uh, if I was concerned about racism I would’ve moved out of America a long time ago.”
Chris Rock can be heard reacting in disbelief in the clip, while Variety reported booing from the audience, who were mostly left in a stunned silence.
Kanye’s support for Donald Trump stretches as far back as 2016, when the rapper was seen arriving at Trump Tower shortly after the result of the Presidential Election was announced.
This year, he’s made headlines on multiple occasions with his tweets in support of the President (and lost a number of high-profile Twitter followers in the process).
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Kanye’s appearance on ‘SNL’ was as a last-minute replacement, when first pick Ariana Grande dropped out due to what executive producer Lorne Michaels described as “emotional reasons”.