Kanye West is a number of things. He’s a rapper, singer, producer and songwriter. In addition, he’s also an entrepreneur, film director and fashion designer.
Now, West is also a doctor. On Monday, college dropout West, who left both American Academy of Art and later Chicago State University to pursue a career in music, received an honorary doctorate from Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, where he delivered a lecture.
What West is not is tactful. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that Yeezy found the time to use his SAIC guest lecture the day before to bad-mouth Nike, whom he used to design for.
Yeezy accused Nike of shortchanging him on the two signature sneakers he designed for them. He told the audience:
“I still left [Nike], because they weren’t giving me the opportunity to grow. They were working off an old business model, and [Nike founder and chairman] Phil Knight was somewhere on an island. And then [Nike CEO] Mark Parker would go and find people whom I collaborated with years before, and try to do collaborations with them to seem cool … ”
We also shouldn’t be surprised that yet another jaw-dropping diss by West has gone viral.
Now here’s the diss. Wait for it.
OK, here it is:
“Nike hasn’t done, like, one cool thing this year.”
After West received loud applause for the comment, he added:
“Shots fired!”
Now here’s West’s explanation over leaving Nike:
“So when it was time to do the Adidas collection, and I left Nike because they refused to give me a percentage because I was not an athlete — I don’t have a NDA that says I can’t say this even though it seems wrong to say out loud — I left Nike because they refused to give me a percentage, they also offered me $4 million a year to stay, which is an unknown thing but I’m sure it’ll show up on Hypebeast tomorrow.”
As well as on Hip-Hop Wired, Complex, Ballerstatus and, well, you get the picture.
