The BBC is set to release a new documentary exploring “the rollercoaster life and career” of Kanye West alongside an accompanying podcast. We Need To Talk About Kanye will air on BBC Two and will be hosted by investigative journalist Mobeen Azhar, who previously made the award-winning 2021 Britney Spears conservatorship documentary, The Battle For Britney.
Describing the project in a recent press statement, the BBC wrote: “Unfolding against the backdrop of Ye’s 2024 election campaign, and at a time when his behaviour has sparked outrage and a re-evaluation of his place in popular culture, this one-off documentary follows Mobeen as he attempts to understand the complex journey that led Ye to become one of the most famous and creatively successful artists of his generation. But more recently, to condemnation and notoriety.”
An accompanying eight-part podcast series, The Kanye Story, will feature discussions with special guests “who can bring an insight into Kanye’s life and dig deeper into his place in culture; starting with the early stratospheric success to the condemnation of later years”.
While a broadcast date has not yet been announced, the BBC has said that We need To Talk About Kanye and The Kanye Story will be released “in the coming months.”
The documentary is well-timed. Last week, the Anti-Defemation Legue (ADL), an international Jewish NGO, released a report linking West’s recent anti-semitic splurge to 30 seperate hate incidents in the US alone. “These incidents — which include vandalism, banner drops, targeted harassment and campus propaganda distributions — demonstrate the ongoing influence of Ye’s conspiratorial, bigoted rants,” the ADL wrote.
The report also observes that “immediately following Ye’s antisemitic comments,” which included “inflammatory tropes about Jewish power and Holocaust denial”, a slogan reading “Ye is Right” began cropping up on anti-semitic accounts online. West was recently named ‘Antisemite Of The Year’ by the watchdog group StopAntisemitism, having previously tweeted that planned to go “death con 3 [sic] On JEWISH PEOPLE”.
