Today, a new song titled “idk (Demo)” appeared on Kanye West‘s Apple Music page without announcement. It was accompanied by a grainy, low-res image and, if you pressed play, sounded absolutely nothing like Kanye, even given the fact that in the poopity scoop era, our understanding of “a Kanye West song” may need to be temporarily suspended. Despite being swiftly picked up by the content machine (Uproxx, for one, instantly described it as “mysterious new song”), “idk (Demo)” is what it appears to be: not actually a new Kanye West song. A source connected to Kanye tells Spin that the song will be removed from his Apple Music page.
Even putting aside the fact that, again, the song bared exactly zero trace of Kanye’s musical DNA let alone his actual voice or that of anyone he has recently worked with, there were other signs pointing us in the direction of a very large, blinking sign that reads “HOAX.” The always insane and often useful Kanye message board Kanye To The quickly discovered that the song’s lyrics appear on Genius as a song called “Idk (iphOnesOng)” by an artist named BigOmuziq. It’s unclear if BigOmuziq was the one who managed to smuggle the song onto Kanye’s Apple Music page (nor would it be the first time something like this has happened to a major artist this year), but we congratulate him nonetheless for what will be a sudden uptick in Google searches. The song was also suspicious given that Kanye has typically first put his new music on Tidal, including one-off singles from this year like “Kanye vs. the People” and “Lift Yourself.”
The song, for what it’s worth, would only have been like the second worst track on ye.
