KANYE KINDA CAVES

Whether it's lecturing the world's most powerful people at the Time 100 gala to "Stand up!" or teasing fellow attendee and Empire creator Lee Daniels about borrowing his own antics for plotlines on the show (“If you see this on Empire, you just know where he got it from”), Kanye West has been expressing himself with a heightened fervor... Check that—of course it's possible for Yeezus to say more.

In a self-edited essay for Paper, Ye addresses some of the controversy around his particpation (and the subsequent public backlash) of Tidal:

"I heard a comment—a joke—about the Tidal press conference being an Illuminati moment. If there was actually an Illuminati, it would be more like the energy companies. Not celebrities that gave their life to music and who are pinpointed as decoys for people who really run the world. I'm tired of people pinpointing musicians as the Illuminati. That's ridiculous. We don't run anything; we're celebrities. We're the face of brands. We have to compromise what we say in lyrics so we don't lose money on a contract. Madonna is in her 50s and gave everything she had to go up on an award show and get choked by her cape. She's judged for who she adopts. Fuck all of this sensationalism. We gave you our lives. We gave you our hearts. We gave you our opinions!”

But West has since deleted all reference to support of Tidal off his Twitter account, so it appears as if he may be re-thinking his alignment with the troubled service, which has reportedly tanked in users this week. Will he end up at Apple, where he already has close ties?