The artist formerly known as Kanye West has, without question, given Saturday Night Live several of its most memorable music moments. In a new Peacock documentary released in commemoration of SNL‘s 50th year, Ye’s impact on how other artists approached their own performances on the show is discussed at length, as is his notorious 2018 appearance during the Yandhi era.
The doc, titled Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music and co-directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez, turns its attention to Ye’s multiple appearances on the show toward the end of its two-hour runtime, starting with a 2005 performance of the Late Registration track “Touch the Sky.”
Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello notes that Ye can be credited with a shift toward more artist-driven stage designs on the show, as prior to him, “you always played in front of the brick wall.” Barry co-creator and SNL alum Bill Hader, meanwhile, is seen remembering Ye having been “nice but really contentious” in his interactions with the team behind the show.
“He had no problem telling us that he found the show incredibly unfunny,” Hader said with a laugh. “He would tell us that on the regular.”
After footage showing Ye’s frustration over a lighting-related disagreement in 2016, the doc turns to September 2018. At the time, Ye was earlier into his public adopting of MAGAism and related ideologies, complete with a red hat he wore in promos for the episode and during the broadcast itself.
“Oh yeah, that is a MAGA hat, huh?” longstanding cast member Kenan Thompson is seen saying in footage of the moments before he and host Adam Driver recorded a promo clip alongside Ye. “I’m just now putting that together.”
As those who recall the episode in question are aware, the bid-the-audience-goodnight portion of the evening took a seemingly unexpected turn when Ye broke into a half-sung, half-spoken diatribe about “the liberals’ who “bully you.” He also spoke of “monolithic thought” and pointed to Trump’s 2016 POTUS win as an encouraging sign for his own presidential aspirations. (Four years later, Ye would say “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler” during a masked Alex Jones interview.)
“I was like, I don’t wanna be up here for this because I don’t agree with this and standing up here seems like I’m standing in solidarity,” Ego Nwodim, current SNL star whose first year on the show was the year of Ye’s MAGA hattery, said in the doc. “So I was like, don’t make any faces. Neutral face, neutral face. Everyone’s gotta know I’m just fulfilling my duties as a cast member. It’s like your first day of school and you’re like, I don’t wanna get in trouble.”
At one point during Ye’s lengthy post-show remarks, only a portion of which made it to air, Nwodim says she looked around to see if there were “other Black people up here.” According to Nwodim, there wasn’t.
“I was the only one,” she said. “Then I thought, they had a meeting. So then I’m like, these motherfuckers.”
Thompson, for his part, saw that something was clearly afoot and opted to swiftly remove himself.
“When he grabbed the mic and was just like, you know, wandering around, you could see he was gearing up to say something,” Thompson, who’s spoken about the incident several other times in the years since, said in the doc. “I was like, I’m out. It would have been cool if he just did the music thing and, I don’t know, spoke through the hat, I guess. Because the hat was loud.”
Steve Higgins, who previously served as co-head writer of SNL and is now mostly known for his Tonight Show duties, pointed out that SNL has long been a “non-censoring show,” aside from profanity.
“No one’s stopping anybody from doing anything,” he said.
The full doc is out now on Peacock. As for Ye, he’s soon set to release his first solo studio album since 2021’s Donda. Titled Bully, the album, which Ye has frequently teased on social media in recent months, is expected at some point this year.
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