Leave it to Kanye West to take one very cool moment—getting honored with an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—to trot out some fresh slander. Yeezy used part of his lecture at the school yesterday evening to slander his old Nike stomping grounds because…creativity.
Said West (while discussing a Corbusier lamp):
So when it was time to do the adidas collection, and I left Nike because they refused to give me a percentage because I was not an athlete—I don’t have a NDA that says I can’t say this even though it seems wrong to say out loud—I left Nike because they refused to give me a percentage, they also offered me $4 million a year to stay, which is a unknown thing but I’m sure it will show up on Hypebeast tomorrow. [laughter]
I wanted people to know that.
[More Laughter]
And I still left them, because they weren’t giving me the opportunity to grow. They were working off an old business model, and Phil Knight was somewhere on an island. And then, Mark Parker would go and find people who I collaborated with years before, and try to do collaborations with them to seem cool, and as you see, Nike hasn’t done like one cool thing this year.
To this there was loud applause, which West eventually punctuated with, “Shots fired!”
I don’t know, Nike gifting Obama with some crispy Js and those Nike LeBron 12 Elite’s are just a couple of cool things Nike did this year. Just saying.
Do you agree with Yeezy? Let us know in the comments.
https://soundcloud.com/complexmag/kanye-west-lecture-at-saic-may-2015/s-xKe5m
[H/T Complex]
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Photo: YouTube
