“Kanye’s Second Coming”

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Kanye’s Second Coming: Inside The Billion-Dollar Yeezy Empire

You know when Kanye West is coming. His matte-black Lamborghini SUV rumbles up his gated driveway on the outskirts of Los Angeles like an earthquake, and when he steps out, in a white T-shirt and dark sweats, the obsessiveness kicks in immediately.

First, there’s the house: The lushly landscaped exterior of the property he shares with his wife, Kim Kardashian West, and their four children (North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm) serves as stark contrast to the unadorned alabaster walls within. Nearly every surface is a monastic shade of white. The floors are made of a special Belgian plaster; if scuffed, the delicate material can be repaired only by a crew flown in from Europe. “The house was all him,” Kardashian West later tells me. “I’ve never seen anyone that pays such attention to detail.”

As I step into the foyer, a handler asks me to wrap my black-and-gray Air Jordan high-tops in little cloth booties. To my left is West’s library, its shelves stacked with the likes of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty and Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics. He fiddles with the positioning of a few books that seem off-kilter. Settling into an armchair opposite me, he surveys his interviewer closely. “The first shoe I remember sketching was the Jordan One that you’re wearing right now,” says West, 42. “God does have a way of lining things up.”

West’s precision turned him into one of the world’s most popular musicians. “He went and executed it to another level,” says DJ Khaled, who has spent time with West in the studio and joins him on this year’s Celebrity 100 list of the world’s highest-paid entertainers. But as with Michael Jordan in the 1990s, the key to West’s wealth stems from sneakers. His Yeezy shoe line, which he launched with Nike in 2009 and then brought to Adidas in 2013, has the 34-year-old Jordan empire in its sights, in terms of both cultural clout and commercial prowess. The Jordan line does approximately $3 billion in annual sales; West’s upstart is expected to top $1.5 billion in 2019 and growing.

As with the floor and the booties and the book positions, West fixates over sneaker details; he idolizes Steve Jobs, preferring a limited, carefully chosen number of products with an endless array of colorways. The iPod in West’s world: the ubiquitous, chunky-bottomed Yeezy Boost 350s, which come in dozens of varieties of the same shoe and account for the bulk of Yeezy’s sales. “I am a product guy at my core,” West says. “To make products that make people feel an immense amount of joy and solve issues and problems in their life, that’s the problem-solving that I love to do.”

The obsessiveness is unrelenting. When Forbes shot West for a possible cover, he insisted on wearing a black hoodie. Urged to return the next day to try again, West obliged—wearing the same hoodie. He’s been known to edit albums days after they’ve already been released. And when he didn’t feel I was properly absorbing the religious influence on his business (coming from the guy who calls himself Yeezus and is working on an album tentatively titled Yandhi), he called my editor impromptu on a Saturday evening to hammer the point some more.

Whatever, it’s working. Mostly because of the shoes, Forbes pegs his pretax income at $150 million over the past 12 months; his team insists the number is even higher, partly due to his Yeezy apparel. In any case, it’s by far the best stretch of his career, good for No. 3 on our Celebrity 100 list.

Rewind to three years ago, when West claimed to be $53 million in debt, just before canceling the back of a lucrative arena tour and checking into a Los Angeles hospital for over a week with symptoms of sleep deprivation and temporary psychosis. West credits his turnaround to religious beliefs (“being in service to Christ, the radical obedience”)—and, on occasion, to being bipolar. Call him creative, call him chaotic—just don’t call him crazy. Like some entrepreneurs with conditions like ADHD and Asperger’s, he sees his diagnosis not as a hindrance but as a “superpower” that unlocks his imagination.

“ ‘Crazy’ is a word that’s not gonna be used loosely in the future,” West says. “Understand that this is actually a condition that people can end up in, be born into, driven into and go in and out. And there’s a lot of people that have been called that ‘C’ word that have ended up on this cover.”

West’s design obsession dates back as far as his passion for music. Born in Atlanta and raised in Chicago, he often got in trouble as a middle schooler for sketching sneakers in class. When West’s mother, a college professor, took him to see the Japanese cyberpunk flick Akira, he found inspiration in the film’s shapes and color palettes; he also remembers his father, a former Black Panther, taking him to auto shows, where he became obsessed with the Lamborghini Countach. “There’s a little bit of Lamborghini in everything I do,” West says. “Yeezy is the Lamborghini of shoes.”

Meticulousness served West in his music career, which took off when he caught on as a producer for Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records after dropping out of college. He masterminded the sonic skeleton of Jay-Z’s seminal 2001 album, The Blueprint. When West launched as a solo artist two and a half years later, he designed something genre-bending, his early work peppered with Marvin Gaye and Daft Punk samples; West recorded with Coldplay and toured with U2. In contrast to the snarling materialism put forth by the dominant rappers of the day, West presented a more vulnerable sort of protagonist, with three albums featuring higher-education themes. Gone were tales of drug dealing and street skirmishes; in their place were reflections on dental surgery, racial injustice and working at the Gap, punctuated by a witty swagger.

His fame gave him a chance to return to his first love: sneakers. In 2007, he created a shoe for the Japanese apparel company A Bathing Ape, complete with a teddy bear logo that appeared on some of his early covers. (Find one of those shoes today and you’ll net several thousand dollars.) It was a start, and he cultivated a cadre of fashion-industry friends like Hedi Slimane, who has served as creative director at Dior Homme and Yves Saint Laurent. “You’re going to do something really strong in shoes,” West remembers the designer telling him. That sort of encouragement gave West the confidence to whip out a notepad when he found himself on a plane with Nike CEO Mark Parker shortly thereafter. Says West: “When he saw me sketch, he said, ‘This guy’s interesting, let’s do a shoe with him.’ ”

Yeezy was born (a shortening of the “Kanyeezy” nickname Jay-Z gave him in the intro to a 2003 song). West says Parker put him in the room with Air Jordan designer Tinker Hatfield, and by mid-2008, West was rocking prototypes of his own Air Yeezy high-top onstage, with the genuine article arriving in 2009. Hip-hop has connected with footwear almost since the genre was born, from Run-D.M.C.’s Adidas shell toes in the mid-1980s to Jay-Z and 50 Cent’s Reeboks two decades later. West was the first to do it at Nike on the level of an NBA superstar.

Says analyst John Kernan of investment bank Cowen, “What he’s done in footwear has been truly transcendent.”

At the same time that West’s business interests were shifting, he began changing too. His mother died in a 2007 cosmetic procedure gone wrong; the following year, he split with his fiancée Alexis Phifer. On his album, 808s and Heartbreak, he ditched rap for heavily autotuned singing.

Then came the bizarre. He hopped onstage to interrupt Taylor Swift’s 2009 acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the MTV VMA ceremony, insisting that Beyoncé should have won the award instead; the episode generated such an intense backlash that he cancelled his planned arena tour with Lady Gaga and moved to Italy to intern for Fendi. When he returned from his European sojourn, his previous praise for the Creator was superseded by an insistence on his own holiness, particularly his 2013 album Yeezus, where he declared flatly, “I am a god.”

West kicked off 2016 by unleashing flurries of Tweets, asserting that he was $53 million in debt before asking Mark Zuckerberg for $1 billion to help fund his creative ideas. Then he embarked on his most ambitious tour yet—one that featured him holding forth atop a platform that looked like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, hovering about a dozen feet above the crowd. West’s rants grew more and more unusual as the tour continued. In one performance, he suggested Jay-Z might be trying to have him assassinated. The year ended with West hospitalized after the tour cancelation. His first appearance after? A pilgrimage to Trump Tower, where he posed with the president-elect (and turned off a lot of his core audience).

His career, however, has proved antic-proof. And he has channeled his intensity profitably, particularly when it comes to sneakers. As sales blossomed at Nike, particularly after the Air Yeezy II release in 2012, West felt that the company was treating him like just another celebrity dabbler. “It was the first shoe to have the same level of impact as an Air Jordan, and I wanted to do more,” West says. “And at that time Nike refused to give celebrities royalties on their shoes.” (Nike declined to comment for this story; two other sources familiar with the arrangement also say he wasn’t being paid royalties.)

West, however, had always insisted on maintaining ownership of his brand. And when Adidas executives caught wind of West’s dissatisfaction, they invited him to Germany and he signed in 2013. Later, with the help of Scooter Braun, who started a stint comanaging West in 2016, they created what appears to be an unprecedented deal: a 15% royalty on wholesale, according to sources familiar with the deal, plus a marketing fee. For comparison, Michael Jordan is thought to get royalties closer to 5%, though he doesn’t own his brand. (After publication, we clarified the timeline of the Adidas deal).

In 2015, West debuted his first “Yeezy Season,” a showcase for his clothing and sneakers. The next year he leveraged his new album to create a launch party for both sneakers and song, at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. His biggest breakthrough: the 350. Marrying his eye for design with Adidas’ Boost technology, which purports to efficiently return energy to runners, West turned trainers into high fashion and made low-top sneakers cool again. The 350’s aggressive stance, leaning forward as if to challenge any foe to a footrace, suddenly had scores of people willing to cough up $200 for a pair of running shoes. Adidas has never released Yeezy’s numbers, but in 2016 West let it slip that his sneakers were selling out surprise 40,000-pair drops in minutes.

His wife—West and Kardashian married in Florence in 2014—gets an assist here, opening up West to her family’s hundreds of millions of social media followers (they routinely sport his Yeezy shoes and apparel).

The partnership works both ways. Kardashian West seeks out her husband’s opinion on all of her projects, from the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood mobile game to her recent shapewear line. When she brought him mockups for the latter, West wasn’t impressed. He sat down and drafted a new logo before personally redesigning the packaging. In any case, West’s advice isn’t limited to the creative side. “He’s just taught me as a person to never compromise and to really take ownership,” says Kardashian West, who ranks No. 26 on The Celebrity 100. “Before, I was really the opposite. I would throw my name on anything.”

Given their hectic schedules, Kardashian West and West often trade ideas at what he calls “bedtime true-crime story meetings,” where she watches police procedurals while he shows her mockups.

“I’m just blessed through the grace of God to go from tweeting at Mark Zuckerberg” to ask for money, West says, to where he is today. He can laugh at himself a little now. “People wondered, ‘Why did you tweet at Mark Zuckerberg?’ And I was like, ‘Hey, I heard he was looking for aliens.’ ”

Speaking of aliens, if you really want to see how West’s creative process works, then a visit to the Star Wars planet of Tatooine is necessary. Inspired by Luke Skywalker’s childhood home, West has been working with a team to design prefabricated structures that sport the same austere aesthetic, with the goal of deploying them as low-income housing units. Just after midnight he ushers me into his Lamborghini for an impromptu visit, barreling back down the road with Bach blasting on the sound system. After about 15 minutes, we arrive at a bungalow in the woods.

A team of four is still clattering away on Apple laptops inside, ahead of a meeting the following morning in San Francisco with potential investors. Around them, the walls are plastered with written notes and sketches. West peers over the shoulders of his charges, instructing them to change a font here or brighten a picture there.

“He pushes people to do their best and pushes people even outside of their comfort zone, which really helps people grow,” Kardashian West says, citing West’s relationship with Louis Vuitton designer and Off-White label founder Virgil Abloh.

After a half hour or so, West appears satisfied with the state of the presentation and motions me toward a back door. We stroll out into the chilly, starless night, and I follow him up a dirt path deeper into the woods for several minutes until he stops at a clearing and looks up, wordless. There, with the hazy heft of something enormous and far away, stand a trio of structures that look like the skeletons of wooden spaceships. They’re the physical prototypes of his concept, each oblong and dozens of feet tall, and West leads me inside each one.

He tells me they could be used as living spaces for the homeless, perhaps sunk into the ground with light filtering in through the top. We stand there in silence for several minutes considering the structures before walking back down to his lurking Lamborghini and zooming off into the night.

For a company that makes Lamborghini-inspired sneakers, Yeezy’s headquarters are remarkably nondescript: a blocky blue-and-gray building just off the main drag in Calabasas. It’s not far from where he’s been hosting his recent Sunday Services—gatherings where popular songs are repurposed with Christian themes by gospel choirs and famous guests from Katy Perry to Dave Chappelle.

When I meet up with West after his return from San Francisco, he doesn’t even mention the investor meeting—already fixated on something else enormous out back. In the parking lot behind his office, laid out in concentric circles, is the sum total of West’s creative output at Adidas: a trove of sneaker prototypes baking in the midday sun, variants of his 350s in a rainbow ranging from blood orange to creamy pistachio alongside a few yet-to-be-released gems like the almost triangular Yeezy basketball shoe (which, he adds almost proudly, has yet to be approved by the NBA—echoing the days when the league fined Michael Jordan for wearing his eponymous sneakers because they violated uniform rules).

West scoops up a 1050 Vortex Boot, which debuted in prototype form at Madison Square Garden in 2016. “I just looked at this line right here,” he says, motioning to a thin strip of blue masking tape on the sole. “I’m going to make this part of the boot. The inside of this will be blue. And I just go with the flow.”

There are about 1,000 pairs laid across the lot, it seems, but when I ask West for the exact tally, he seems almost offended at the notion of reducing his creations to numerals. “You can’t calculate love,” he explains. “If you get a surprise cake from your grandmother, and you didn’t know she was in town, do you start asking her about the batter and specifically the frosting?”

Grandmother?

“These things are made to bring incalculable joy,” he continues. “So to ask me to somehow translate this to numbers is to ask your grandmother exactly what the recipe of the cake was.”

West claims to not be a “numbers guy,” but he has reached an inflection point where someone in the Yeezy orbit needs to be. His brand built its following through its limited releases and surprise drops, much like Air Jordan. The latter, according to NPD retail analyst Matt Powell, has lost a bit of its cachet in recent years as Nike moved to fill declining volume in other areas of business with its iconic sub-brand. “What makes celebrity products sell so well is scarcity,” he says. “So if they make it too broadly available, I think it crashes the business model.”

Adidas seems to be aware of this. “We are continuing to manage volumes in a very disciplined manner so that for 2019 Yeezy sales will not make up a significant share of Adidas’ overall expected sales growth,” says the company’s chief executive, Kasper Rørsted. “Not because brand heat is decreasing, but because we have a disciplined approach to managing volumes and product lifecycles.”

In other words, he’s not willing to chase sales at the expense of prestige, instead continuing to build buzz with surprise drops. The May release of the glow-in-the-dark 350 v2 sold out immediately, even though it rolled out at 6 a.m. in some countries. In June, customers lined up around blocks in Moscow to get a reflective version of a sneaker that had already debuted in the U.S. There are even more far-out concepts in the works, including a shoe made out of algae that will biodegrade completely over time in landfills—or almost immediately if sprayed with a certain type of bacteria.

Perhaps most impressively, West still owns 100% of Yeezy. This is the reason he became a centimillionaire many times over much earlier in his life than Jordan. Given Yeezy’s success, West should eventually join the NBA legend—alongside sister-in-law Kylie Jenner and mentor Jay-Z—in achieving billionaire status, though the never-modest West would claim he’s there already. And then some. “We’ve yet to see all of the beauty that would be manifested through this partnership,” West says. “We’ve only experienced a small glimmer of light.”

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Kanye West Files Trademark Application for "Sunday Service" Merchandise

The filing was made by Mascotte Holdings, the same company that filed trademarks for “Yeezus,” “Yeezy” and "Yandhi."

Kanye West has filed a trademark application for the term “Sunday Service” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, public records show.

The filing was made by Mascotte Holdings, the same company that filed trademarks for “Yeezus,” “Yeezy,” “Red October,” “Yandhi,” “Calabasas Clothing,” “Donda," "Half Beast" and “Kanye West" (among others) on behalf of the hip-hop star.

The application, which was first reported by TMZ, lists “bottoms as clothing,” dresses, footwear, handwear, jackets, loungewear, scarves, shirts, socks and “tops as clothing” as merchandise to be sold bearing the mark. It was filed on July 19.

The proposed mark seems to be a takeoff on West’s weekly Sunday Service concerts/church services, which feature choral arrangements of popular songs (including West’s) and regularly attract high-profile guests. Back in April he brought the service to Coachella, where he sold religious-themed apparel bearing such phrases as "Holy Spirit," "Trust God" and "Jesus Walks."

The Blasphemer Looms.

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Has Kanye Lost His Jesus Complex and Found Christ?
The rapper attributes his turnaround and creative inspiration to godly obedience.

JULY 30, 2019

It’s been 15 years since Christianity Today reviewed Kanye West’s debut album, The College Dropout—quoting verses from “Jesus Walks” and other God-tinged tracks, while warning that the release overall is “far from pious, with an array of expletives and lyrical undesirables.”

“One wonders why West so adamantly makes a case for Christ in ‘Jesus Walks,’ yet quickly dismisses him via duplicitous party rhymes,” wrote Andree Farias. “The answer is probably in the album’s liner notes, where West openly declares that he’s not where he needs to be, despite still being on God’s side.”

Christian fans have asked questions about Kanye’s relationship with God over and over since then (as they do with many other celebrities who reference faith in their work and interviews). What does it mean for him to make a “gospel album with a lot of cursing”? What’s up with the Yeezus nickname and Christ imagery? Is Kanye’s discussion of his spiritual life sincere or just part of an act?

For followers of Kanye—who’s now also a designer, shoe mogul, husband to Kim Kardashian, and friend of President Donald Trump—the questions around his Christianity have compounded lately.

While Kanye has referenced God and Jesus throughout his career, back to the “Jesus Walks” days, the 42-year-old has begun to make more overt remarks about God’s work in his life and ventures, including his much-talked-about “Sunday Services,” weekly gatherings for family and celeb friends to fellowship and sing together.

Plus, he’s publicly discussing topics like the role of the church, passages of the Bible, and obedience to Christ.

“As always with Kanye, it’s hard to discern with precision where he’s at,” said Cray Allred, a Christian writer, podcast producer, and hip-hop fan. “While he has moved away from relying so heavily on gospel sampling in his music (an early trademark of his sound), Kanye seems to feel much more like an insider to Christianity now.”

Christian writer Tyler Huckabee joked this week that “Kanye’s transformation into dorky youth pastor is nearly complete” upon reading that he started including Christianized versions of Nirvana songs in his Sunday Service lineup, including a rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” rewritten as “Let your light shine, it’s contagious / here we are now, inspiration.”

While Kanye doesn’t belong to a traditional congregation, his outdoor Sunday Services have begun to host preachers, including friend and Miami church planter Rich Wilkerson (who officiated Kanye’s wedding) and Hillsong New York pastor Carl Lentz.

When Forbes prepared a recent cover story on Kanye West’s “creative mind” and “billion-dollar sneaker empire,” the Yeezys creator called up an editor at the magazine, concerned that the reporter hadn’t understood the religious influence on his business.

In the piece, which Forbes titled “Kanye’s Second Coming,” he credited God with his personal and professional turnaround. He said he is “just blessed through the grace of God” to be in the place he is now, after his reputation and business took a hit a few years back, and that “being in service to Christ, the radical obedience” transformed him after a mental breakdown. (He says he has also been treated for bipolar disorder.)

Plus, Kanye cited Scripture as an influence, saying he reads the Old Testament for inspiration as he designs.

“A lot of my creative friends, I tell them the Bible is better than Pinterest. You can bring something into space and time we exist in, while reflecting thousands of years of truth,” he said, pulling out his phone to read Leviticus 19:19: “You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material” (ESV).

“It’s gratifying to see a cultural giant like him create things out of a place of respectful conversation with the Bible,” faith-and-fashion writer Whitney Bauck, an editor at Fashionista.com, told CT. “Though West has done plenty of subverting Christian motifs throughout his career—i.e. posing as Jesus for a Rolling Stone cover and describing himself as a god—his attitude toward Leviticus here seems to be one of genuine delight and respect.”

Kanye smiles with an “aha!” look in his eyes as he explained in the Forbes video that his apparel team sticks to single-material garments, and he has gone as far as calling out someone for wearing a wool jacket with leather sleeves. “I remember sending a manager I used to work with a really rude email about how … he set culture back by ten years,” he said. “So now I can send him the verse from the Bible that says, ‘You should not wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material.’”

But again, more questions: “How does Kanye decide which parts of the Bible to bring to bear on his work? Here he’s zeroing in on an Old Testament verse that the majority of Christians treat as a mandate intended for a specific time and people group that's no longer applicable today,” Bauck said. “It’s not totally clear … whether Kanye’s using the verse merely as an inspirational jumping-off point to help him approach design differently, or whether he believes that’s what the God of the Bible still wants and asks of God-followers.”

This has been a major year for Kanye. He and wife, Kim, welcomed their fourth child and named him Psalm. (A source told People that Kanye has been reading the poetic books of the Bible over and over.)

Months ago, he launched Sunday Services, weekly spiritual singalongs turned into a Coachella performance, which have drawn choirs and celebrities to gather for fellowship. On Keeping Up with the Kardashians, he said, “I had the idea of making a church before but I really was sketching it out. Then in 2019, I was like ‘I’m not letting a Sunday go by without making this.’”

Kirk Franklin—who had been in touch with Kanye for years before their collaboration on “Ultralight Beam” in 2016—has applauded the Sunday Services as a genuine expression of Kanye’s faith and evidence that he is willing to invest time, money, and effort into it.

He told Beats 1 Radio in May that he has seen Kanye’s walk with Christ progress. “There’s a respect and a love. When I say something to him, I’m now seeing the response,” he said. “People are on their journey, and when they fall, we need to hold them accountable, but let’s hold them accountable [by] loving them back to health.”

Kanye’s long had ties to artists in gospel music, hip Christian pastors, and believers in the industry, and he seems to be building on those relationships, like his collaborations with “Fear of God” label creator Jerry Lorenzo, who also designed tour looks for Justin Bieber.

Wilkerson, the Miami pastor who texts Kanye encouragement and appeared at a recent Sunday Service gathering, previously told CT: “There’s not a strategy or a network. It’s just, ‘Let’s befriend people. The goal is to be like Jesus, and I think Jesus would show love and grace to anybody in his path.”

Kanye himself is not a pastor or Christian leader, so the faith he practices and preaches as a rapper and designer will likely continue to defy believers’ expectations. And that’s not a bad thing, according to Katherine Ajibade, who wrote about Kanye’s influence while a researcher at the British think tank Theos.

“I would like Christians to deter from thinking of Kanye as a celebrity Christian, only using his faith to further his career. I think what is particularly wonderful about West is how he is using his artistry to offer a version of Christianity that is not only culturally relevant, but innovative, intricate and forward facing,” said Ajibade, who will study the anthropology of Christianity at the London School of Economics and Political Science starting this fall.

“It is here that Kanye West is pushing the boundaries of how Christianity is represented in contemporary culture. And yet, he is doing so in a way that grounds it in his personal understanding of what it means to be a Christian.”

Even among those who hope and pray that Kanye’s transformation is sincere, there are some concerns about the version of Christianity he represents at this stage in his walk.

“The caution I would give is that a new age-y, celebration-of-self vibe seems to be resonating with him more so than the historic tenets of redemption and the cross of Christ,” said Allred. “He’s much more self-aware than most give him credit for (e.g., proving, tongue-in-cheek, the merits of his fashion designing impulses with an out-of-context Levitical passage), but being drawn only to the images of God that flatter us is something that has driven shallow belief for millennia, and not just among egomaniacs.”

“Where I would hold out hope is that Kanye has, by his own accounts, fallen deeply into the unfulfilling pit of fame and success and come up desperate for genuine love and purpose.”

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Sep 19, 2019, 06:00am

Highest-Paid Hip-Hop Acts 2019: Kanye Tops Jay-Z To Claim Crown

Back in 2007, Kanye West released a song called “Big Brother”—an ode to Jay-Z. Indeed, catching on with the mogul’s Roc-A-Fella Records two decades ago was West’s first big break. Jay-Z even had a hand in coining West’s nickname, Yeezy, which now graces his eponymous shoe line with Adidas.

“There was a beam of light on the idea of me making athletic footwear,” West explained in an interview for the August cover of Forbes. “A paradigm shift. Like the Yeezy is desired as much as a Jordan.”

Yeezy is expected to top $1.5 billion in sales this year—or about half of what Nike’s Air Jordan pulls in—boosting West’s pretax income to $150 million over the past year and making him hip-hop’s cash king for the first time ever. Another career first: West out-earned Jay-Z, who ranks second on this year’s list with $81 million, buoyed by the tail end of his On The Run II tour with wife Beyoncé. Drake, the most-streamed artist of any genre, rounds out the top three with $75 million.

All in all, the top 20 acts in hip-hop banked a combined $860 million, up 33% from $648 million last year. The bar for entry is $18 million, the highest it’s ever been. Our numbers represent pretax income from June 2018 to June 2019 before deducting fees for agents, managers and lawyers; figures are based on data from Nielsen Music, Pollstar, Bandsintown and interviews with experts, handlers and some of the stars themselves.

West isn’t the only familiar name to have a career year, even in his own family. Travis Scott, seemingly set to become an uncle to West’s children, rode his Astroworld – Wish You Were Here Tour to a $58 million payday and the No. 5 spot on the list. That’s two places ahead of DJ Khaled, who notched a personal best $40 million annual haul after overcoming his fear of flying in the wake of his son’s birth—and expanded his touring business while adding partnerships with Air Jordan and Luc Belaire.

“Khaled is the guy you want on your team,” says the DJ and third-person enthusiast. “Khaled is a guy that is going to hit that home run ‘cause his work ethic is incredible. His heart is in the right place. His mindset is focused. He's ahead of his time.”

Live music, however, isn’t the only path to profit. Diddy (No. 4, $70 million) raked in the bulk of his bucks from his lucrative deal with Diageo’s Ciroc vodka; Birdman (No. 16, $20 million) owes his payday to his appropriately-titled label Cash Money Records; and Nas (No. 18, $19 million) returns to the list for the second-straight year thanks largely to multimillion-dollar exits in startup investments like PillPack and Lyft.

There are two newcomers on this year’s list. The highest-paid among them is Donald Glover (No. 10, $35 million), who padded his coffers with his work on Atlanta and his This Is America Tour (as Childish Gambino). Cardi B (No. 13, $28 million) follows close behind—at age 26, she’s the youngest artist in this year’s rankings—and joins Nicki Minaj (No. 12, $29 million) as one of only two women on the list, the latest example of a pay gap that has long plagued hip-hop.

Though Minaj recently announced plans to retire, there are plenty of young female emcees who should soon be pushing for spots on the list. Among those to keep an eye on: Meghan Thee Stallion, Tierra Whack and Rico Nasty, all of whom are in the midst of building lasting fan bases. Or, as the latter put it to Forbes earlier this year: “This is my opportunity to make these people lifelong friends.”

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Kanye West, Imax Reveal Exclusive Movie Collaboration

10:24 PM PDT 9/28/2019

Imax on Saturday revealed a collaboration with Kanye West, in which they will release the film Jesus Is King exclusively in Imax theaters around the world on Oct. 25.

"Filmed in the summer of 2019, Jesus Is King brings Kanye West’s famed Sunday Service to life in the Roden Crater, visionary artist James Turrell’s never-before-seen installation in Arizona’s Painted Desert," Imax said in a statement. "This one-of-a-kind experience features songs arranged by West in the gospel tradition along with music from his new album Jesus Is King — all presented in the immersive sound and stunning clarity of Imax."

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Kanye West Omits Profanity From Vocabulary After Getting "Radically Saved"

Tyson is also apart of the creative process of Jesus Is King, with Kanye condemning the use of secular tropes like curse words in his music.

"If somebody cusses in his presence, I’ve heard him say a couple of times, “Hey, man, you can’t cuss when you’re with me. I’m a born-again Christian.” Who’s gonna say that if they’re not meaning that they want Christ to be exalted in all that they do?[He told me], 'From now on, all I want to do is serve Christ. I want every song that I sang, to have part of my testimony, to include the gospel, and to include the element of worship to our great God. That’s what I want to do.'"

[djjeffresh]

[Employee]

[Employee]

[Beastly Swagger]

How fitting a unstable Kanye' resurgence thread w/ Phila's resident unstable manic.

[Employee]

[ogie]

Christ the forehead on that guy

[admiral]

Hot garbage - this is the only track I'd listen to more than once. He managed to turn a song with the Clipse and Kenny G into some bullshit...

[Rhyme 4 Rhyme]

Hot garbage - this is the only track I'd listen to more than once. He managed to turn a song with the Clipse and Kenny G into some bullshit...

Album was useless outside of this.