When it was announced that Kanye West would be headlining all three days of Wireless Festival 2026 — his first UK performance in 11 years — I could feel the city grappling with its conscience.
This isn’t your standard “guilty pleasure” performer. This isn’t a case of weighing up whether the comedic benefit of going to see Pitbull is worth The O2’s prices. This is a different type of guilt.
For the past ten years, Kanye West has made it his mission to offend and attack just about every marginalised group he could think of. Some of his worst offences include releasing a song entitled “Heil Hitler”, claiming that slavery was Black people’s choice, arguing against the victims of P Diddy, and insisting that he has total “dominion” over his wife, Bianca Censori.
Nearly any other public figure would have been cancelled into oblivion by this point. With Kanye, things are different. Due to a truly unique combination of factors, Kanye is uncancellable.
For one, it is generally understood that West struggles with bipolar disorder, which makes him more prone to manic, delusional behaviour. West himself has attributed many of his recent actions to this. In January 2026, the rapper and producer took out a full-page advert in The Wall Street Journal to display a public apology, entitled “To Those I’ve Hurt”.
“One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 are the disconnected moments — many of which I still cannot recall — that led to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body-experience,” Ye wrote in the apology. “I am not a Nazi or an anti-semite,” he added, “I love Jewish people.”
And then there’s his talent. We could talk about Kanye West’s 24 Grammy awards, or how eleven of his twelve studio albums have reached number one on the Billboard albums chart, or how his early production style still influences hip-hop today. But the simple reality is that Kanye’s music has soundtracked many of our lives, from messy house parties and first nights out way-back-when to dinner parties and weddings today.
The cost-benefit analysis of Kanye has become somewhat of a meme this week, with various social media accounts mocking up graphs that plot an artist’s musical prowess against their propensity for controversy. Kanye consistently charts the highest on both axes.
But is that potent mix of talent and mental ill-health really enough to make it all okay? Can bipolar disorder really cancel out spreading Nazi propaganda?
Compare this conflict, if you will, with Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson’s tics at the BAFTAs, which caused him to shout racial slurs. It was widely accepted that, while awful, these were out of his control, and Davidson should not be punished or harassed for something he cannot help. The same could be argued about Kanye — except John Davidson didn’t then embark on a three-date 50,000-capacity tour shortly after issuing his apology. He quietly went back to his life and continued living out of the limelight.
Regardless of what motivated Kanye’s tirades, Pandora’s box was still opened, hate was still spread, and in some cases, harm cannot be undone. The Jewish Leadership Council has condemned Wireless’s decision to platform West, calling the decision “deeply irresponsible.” I can understand why Jewish people would never be able to see past his actions. It is their community he has hit the hardest, focused like a laser beam when it comes to spreading anti-Semitism, for years.
Nobody has to forgive West for what he has done — even if it was motivated by a mental health condition that he often can’t control, and even if he doesn’t remember it. Whether or not you choose to forgive Kanye is an individual decision to be taken person-by-person and will undeniably be influenced by how much skin you have in the game.
Commercially, he has already been forgiven: his booking at Wireless confirms that. It’s the speed with which he’s returned to the limelight that concerns me. That page in The Wall Street Journal might have been expensive, but it’s far from undoing the harm he has caused over the past ten years. He will be paid for these concerts — handsomely, I assume — and if he was truly serious about his remorse then he would donate a substantial portion of that sum to charities that work in aid of the communities he has spent years harassing.
I do wish I could have seen Ye before his more recent breakdowns. Then I wouldn’t have to grapple with the impossible question: can we separate the art from the artist? Right now, I’m still not sure. But if you end up punching in your bank details on that ticket purchase page, you’ll have to make peace with the fact that your answer is yes.
