A week after releasing his new album, ‘Ye’, Kanye West has changed one of its tracks, to include a lyric about slavery.
On the opening song, ‘I Thought About Killing You’, Kanye has included a line which alludes to recent controversial comments he made in an interview with TMZ, claiming that 400 years of slavery in America “sounded like a choice” to him.
The track now includes the line: “If I wasn’t shining so hard, wouldn’t be no shade, Buckwheat-ass n***a, it’s gon’ be otay. Sorry, but I chose not to be no slave.”
Kanye faced a huge backlash last month when he told TMZ: “When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison.
“I like the word ‘prison’ because ‘slavery’ goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews.
“Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.”
In the ‘Ye’ track ‘She Wouldn’t Leave’, Kanye discusses the emotional reaction his wife, Kim Kardashian, had to the controversy, which she addressed for the first time earlier this week.
She said: “He always calms me down… this time I wasn’t so calm...
“I knew what he meant and I know his heart so after about a week, I was calm. I think he explained it well in the song.”
Kim also revealed she “cried a lot” when she first heard the song ‘She Wouldn’t Leave’, on which Kanye claims he told his wife that if she wanted to end their marriage over the furore, he would understand, though she ultimately decided to stay with him.
She added: “I cried [when I heard the song] because it is a lot of what we went through.”
While promoting his last album, ‘The Life Of Pablo’, Kanye repeatedly made changes to the seemingly completed product, including the addition of a whole new track, ‘Saint Pablo’.