How has Kanye West’s Relevancy Changed Over the Span of His Professional Career?
A rapper, a global super star, a celebrity meltdown, who is he? Many may call him Yeezy, Ye, or even just simply Kanye West. A man both deemed as a global celebrity and as one of the 21st century’s most controversial individuals. Kanye West has put himself and the communities he has fostered over the timeline of his career through quite a bit of ups and downs. Kanye has also been the face of many brand deals including Nike, Adidas, Apple Music, Balenciaga and many more brands. I as a curious data science student at the University of Colorado and as someone who has listened to his music over the years, wanted to take a deeper dive into how different phases of Kanye’s public image have changed over his career. I have always wanted to see how real world data can describe Kanye’s strategy to stay relevant for so many years.
In my Information Exposition class I have recently learned about utilizing one of python’s most useful tools for looking at data of any subject matter. When one thinks of retrieving information regarding any topic, one place comes to mind, Wikipedia. By using a wikifunctions library, I was able to take a deeper dive into how the Wikipedia page for Kanye West can be used as a reflection of data points.
Page Views for Kanye West
Using a page views function from the wikifunctions library, I am able to aggregate the oldest available timestamps to the most recent ones to see how the page views for Kanye West have changed over time. I wanted to highlight three major events that have occurred in Kanye’s career that present three different strategies for increasing relevance and public exposure.
The three different strategies Kanye has used over the years since 2015 can be considered controversial for someone who has built the foundation of their career as a hiphop/rap star. In 2016 we see one of the first strategies in the availability of the dataset for page views. Kanye around this time in this first peak was releasing his seventh studio album “The Life of Pablo.” Around this same time, Kanye West was engaged in a twitter feud with another famous rapper Wiz Khalifa who was dating one of Kanye’s exes. After a nasty back and forth of “roasting” and childish remarks over Amber Rose, the ex, the two settled their differences over the topic of their relationships. In the light of a new album releasing, this strategy clearly worked as there was a spike in page views in this time period at around 100,000 views.
The next significant relevance strategy being implemented that I wanted to bring to light was the big spike that occurred in the middle of 2020. Around this time Kanye West announced that he was going to run for president in the 2020 election, which was completely unheard of from someone who’s career is developed in the hiphop/rap music industry. The world was definitely taken by storm during this time because Kanye was publicly a friend of former President Donald Trump who was also running at the same time.
Finally I wanted to bring to light the last relevancy strategy that Kanye implemented over the course of this data provided by the wikifunctions library. In October 2022, Kanye West brought out several anti-semetic and hate speech comments which resulted in a spotlight that many would consider to be horrible. Kanye West’s page views hit a new record on Wikipedia surpassing 150,000 views. This spotlight quickly showed the world Kanye’s controversies peaking in what is simply put as tumultuous and inhumane.
How Was Kanye’s Relevance Impacted After his Worst Controversy?
Following the large and undisputed controversies of Kanye West in late 2022, there have been a number of repercussions resulting in the hate speech made. In what is known in modern day terms as “cancel culture”. Major brands such as Adidas, Apple Music, Balenciaga, his own lawyers and many more dropped their affiliations with the rapper. This “cancellation” of Kanye can also be clearly reflected in the wikipedia page revisions for Kanye West. Using wikifunctions, we can see the size of the revisions made to Kanye West’s page. The revisions can be aggregated together with timestamps to visualize what the size of the revisions to his page are over the course of time. Clearly following the events in 2022 there is almost an immediate drop off in the size of the revisions made to Kanye West’s page and the cancellation of the demand for information on him. It’s almost quite staggering how the drop off is nearly vertical and shows that controversies of this manner can be so destructive to someone’s career.
Kanye West’s Wikipedia Page and the Number of Revisions Made
The following visualization above shows the number of revisions made to Kanye West’s wikipedia page presenting how spikes in his relevancy has occurred from times of promoting his music, to being involved in twitter feuds, to presidential campaigns and gut wrenching hate speech comments.
