Kanye West is a tinkerer. The streaming era has been a gift and a curse for an artist who loves to obsess over how best to perfect a song, giving him arguably too much power to go into the studio and keep working on his music even after it’s already been released. It was true for The Life of Pablo and it seems to be true for his latest album ye, as Billboard reports that Kanye has added a new lyric to the first track, “I Thought About Killing You.” Kanye now raps on the song, “Buckwheat-ass n—a, it’s gon’ be okay / Sorry but I chose not to be no slave,” making reference to his slavery comments in a recent TMZ interview.
The new line seems to be found only on the clean version of the record, not the explicit version, a curious choice given both the content of the lyric and its appearance on a version fewer people would presumably listen to. It also recalls a tidbit from an interview with Kim Kardashian West at the ye listening party, where she said she heard a specific line on the album and told West, “You have to take this line out.” Kardashian West did not indicate which line on which song she told him to remove, but it’s hard to imagine this update to “I Thought About Killing You” passing the Kim K protocol. Listen to the updated version below.
