Editor’s note: The story was edited at 9:35 a.m. April 22, 2025 to remove some sexually graphic language.
Kanye West has alluded to incestuous behavior between he and his male cousin when they were children.
The rapper, who goes by the stage name Ye, shared a clip of his new song “Cousins” while explaining the context behind it in an X post Monday morning, April 21.
“This song is called COUSINS about my cousin that’s locked in jail for life for killing a pregnant lady a few years after I told him we wouldn’t ‘look at dirty magazines together,’ anymore,” West, 47, wrote in the post.
“Perhaps in my self centered mess I felt it was my fault that I showed him those dirty magazines when he was 6 and then we acted out what we saw My dad had playboy magazines but the magazines I found in the top of my moms closet were different,” the rapper continued.
In the snippet of the song, West is heard singing and rapping with a distorted filter over his voice.
The lyrics are as follows:
“We seen two [expletive] kissing, we ain’t know what that [expletive] mean,” he raps. “Then we start reenacting everything that we had seen / That’s when I gave my cousin [expletive]… I told my cousin not tell nobody / Please don’t make me take it to my grave / The truth will set you free someday / I don’t think they understand, that I’m not attracted to a man.”
While not much is known about his incarcerated cousin, both West and his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, have talked about him.
West told Jimmy Kimmel in August 2018 that his cousin “is locked up for murder,” adding that, “He did a bad thing, but I still love him.”
Meanwhile Kardashian, who shares four young children with West, referenced his cousin during a discussion with Marc M. Howard, president of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice organization, in April 2020.
“Kanye’s aunt, my husband’s aunt, his cousin has a double life sentence for a murder that he committed when he was 17,” Kardashian explained at the time.
West also recently opened up about his abusive childhood in a series of confessional posts shared earlier this month.
“When I was growing up my parents beat me,” the rapper wrote in the since-deleted post, Complex reported.
“Like when I deserved it…Not in abusive way…I guess. … I’d be like, ‘Mom, I’m really upset. I didn’t get the starter hat to go with the jacket you just bought me, ‘and then I got backhanded out the blue…Just seems like that wouldn’t be woke.”
