Kanye West has alluded to incestuous behavior between he and his male cousin when they were children.
The rapper, who goes by the stage name Ye, shared a clip of his new song “Cousins” while explaining the context behind it in an X post Monday morning, April 21.
“This song is called COUSINS about my cousin that’s locked in jail for life for killing a pregnant lady a few years after I told him we wouldn’t ‘look at dirty magazines together,’ anymore,” West, 47, wrote in the post.
“Perhaps in my self centered mess I felt it was my fault that I showed him those dirty magazines when he was 6 and then we acted out what we saw My dad had playboy magazines but the magazines I found in the top of my moms closet were different,” the rapper continued.
He then ended the post with, “My name is Ye and I sucked my cousins [expletive] till I was 14. Tweet sent.”
In the snippet of the song, West is heard singing and rapping with a distorted filter over his voice.
The lyrics are as follows:
“We seen two [expletive] kissing, we ain’t know what that [expletive] mean,” he raps. “Then we start reenacting everything that we had seen / That’s when I gave my cousin head… I told my cousin not tell nobody / Please don’t make me take it to my grave / The truth will set you free someday / I don’t think they understand, that I’m not attracted to a man.”
While not much is known about his incarcerated cousin, both West and his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, have talked about him.
West told Jimmy Kimmel in August 2018 that his cousin “is locked up for murder,” adding that, “He did a bad thing, but I still love him.”
Meanwhile Kardashian, who shares four young children with West, referenced his cousin during a discussion with Marc M. Howard, president of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice organization, in April 2020.
“Kanye’s aunt, my husband’s aunt, his cousin has a double life sentence for a murder that he committed when he was 17,” Kardashian explained at the time.
West also recently opened up about his abusive childhood in a series of confessional posts shared earlier this month.
“When I was growing up my parents beat me,” the rapper wrote in the since-deleted post, Complex reported.
“Like when I deserved it…Not in abusive way…I guess. … I’d be like, ‘Mom, I’m really upset. I didn’t get the starter hat to go with the jacket you just bought me, ‘and then I got backhanded out the blue…Just seems like that wouldn’t be woke.”
