Music

Kanye’s On-Stage Auto-Tuned Rant About Michael Jordan Lasts Three Whole Minutes, Is Perfect

"I'm talking about one of the most important people in our civilisation."

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

In a world almost suffocated by the posturing God-complex of Kanye West, it’s easy to forget that the man might be having a bit of fun with it all. Maybe that’s why moves like the ‘Bound 2’ clip — in retrospect, a fairly obvious and self-aware attempt at Mills & Boon kitsch — land online with such a thud.

It also explains the beauty in moments like this: Kanye’s heartfelt, three-minute Auto-tuned rant on stage in Chicago, in which he laments the city’s loss of Michael Jordan to the Washington Wizards in 2001 — a team Jordan bought in 2000 following his second retirement from the Chicago Bulls.

“We shoulda never ever let Michael Jordan play for the Wizards / We shoulda never ever let Michael Jordan play for the Wizards / Why did that happen? Why did that happen?”

“When a player wants to become an owner / When a player that’s done more for the league than the league could have done for him / When a player that made the NBA wants to become an owner of a team he brought so much glory to / A team that has his statue on the front of the motherfucking building.

“But do you know what the owners of that team told MJ? / ‘You’re just a player my boy, you can’t get no pay, you can’t own shit.’ / They told Michael Jordan that he couldn’t own shit!”