Kanye West must be a bit jetlagged. After his headline performance at Splendour In The Grass the weekend before last, he dashed back to New York City to perform with Jay Z during the week and then jetted off to play the Big Chill Festival in Herefordshire in the UK where he embarked on a 10 minute rant in which he informed the booing crowd that people in the music industry ‘compared him to Hitler’.
During his set, he embarked on a largely nonsensical rant in which he allegedly said “There is so much bullshit going on in the music industry right now. Someone needs to make a difference. People treat me like Hitler.” There are various versions of the rant going around, some of which went “I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I’m fucking insane, like I’m Hitler,” he bleated. “One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did.”
He then went on to defend his video for the song ‘Monster’ which featured cannibalism and women being strung up by their necks, “Who saw the video before it got banned, before they took it down and before women’s groups starting saying that a person that lost the most important woman in his life is now against women in some way?” ranted West, in reference to the death of his mother in 2007.
Set times were moved forward at the festival, although Kanye arrived on stage fashionably late, blaming his delay on losing his voice. His bizarre rant compared himself to basketball great Michael Jordan, saying “Michael Jordan changed so much in basketball, he took his power to make a difference. It’s so much fucking going on in music right now and somebody has to make a fucking difference”.
He continued by whinging about his video for ‘Watch The Sky’ missing out best video at the MTV Europe in 2006 to Justice and Simian, still smarting over the loss because the video ‘cost a million dollars. West finished off with a tribute to ‘Queen Amy’ Winehouse in which he performed ‘Back To Black’ and ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’.
