Kanye West responds to Nicki Minaj not granting permission to use verse on ‘New Body’

15 December, 2023

Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Credit: MEGA/GC Images and Dia Dipasupil via GETTY

Kanye West has responded to Nicki Minaj not granting him permission to use her verse on his track ‘New Body’.

The rapper was supposed to release his joint album ‘Vultures’ with Ty Dolla $ign today (December 15). The LP is set to include features from Freddie Gibbs, Playboi Carti, Future, James Blake, and others. It was also recently reported it would interpolate Backstreet Boys’ ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’ and feature his own daughter North. However, the album has not appeared on streaming platforms yet.

West took to X/Twitter to nab one more feature for the album. In a tweet tagging Minaj, West shared a screenshot of a text he sent to the rapper, reading: “Hi it’s Ye. May I call you about clearing new body on the new album”.

Minaj responded in an Instagram live and said: “Child, that train has left the station, OK? No disrespect in any way, I just put out a brand new album,” she continued, referencing the recently released ‘Pink Friday 2’. “Why would I put out a song that has been out for three years? Come on, guys.”

In a newly released video of West ranting during his ‘Vultures’ album listening party – which was relocated from a warehouse to what looked like a hotel suite in Las Vegas – that was live streamed and shared on social media, the rapper addressed Minaj not clearing her verse on the track.

“I made that girl rewrite her verse three times for ‘Monster’. I supported her career. So I don’t know what it is. But we going to get this or we just ain’t going to push it,” West said.

The track was previously teased by Ty Dolla $ign in Geneva; ‘New Body’ was originally set to feature on ‘Yandhi’, a Kanye West album that was eventually scrapped in 2018. At the time, the engineer for ‘Yandhi’ told XXL that ‘New Body’ was “Kanye, Nicki and Ty Dolla $ign [and] it’s Kim K-inspired for sure”.

Elsewhere in the video of West’s rant, he mentioned topics such as Adidas dropping him for being anti-Semitic, Hitler, Jay-Z, the Rothschild family, Drake, Balenciaga, Travis Scott and more. Check out the full video below.

West has been embroiled in a number of controversies in the run-up to ‘Vultures’. Its title track referenced the anti-Semitic comments West made in the past with the lyric: “How I’m anti-Semitic? I just fucked a Jewish bitch.”

Accusations of anti-Semitism were first levelled against West in October 2022 after he said that he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”, whom he claims have a link with Black people. An ex-staffer at TMZ has also claimed that the rapper once praised “Hitler and the Nazis” during an interview with the site.

More recently, employees at Adidas working on his Yeezy line accused the rapper of drawing a swastika in their first meeting, which occurred around 2013. They also said he continued to express anti-Semitic sentiments in later meetings, including telling a Jewish colleague to “hang a photo of Hitler in his kitchen and kiss it every day to practice unconditional love”.

It was also reported that West wore a black KKK-style hood at one of the listening events for ‘Vultures’.

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