Jack Antonoff: Kanye West “just needs his diaper changed so badly”

Jack Antonoff is extremely protective of Taylor Swift. “I’m a little bitch sometimes. But you come after my friend Taylor, you’re toast to me,” he declares in a new Los Angeles Times profile. (Questioning her songwriting “is like challenging someone’s faith in God,” he says hyperbolically. “You just don’t go there.”) His ire may be directed at any number of Swift’s enemies, but special attention is given to Kanye “Ye” West, whom Antonoff says “just needs his diaper changed so badly.”

Given that Antonoff is one of the most sought-after producers in the music business at the moment, the Times had to ask: would he give Ye a shot in the studio? Obviously not! “It’s been a long time since I would’ve taken Kanye’s call,” he says with a laugh. “I’m so incredibly bored when someone doesn’t have the sauce anymore, so they go elsewhere to shock. It’s just a remarkable waste of space.”

The Bleachers frontman is quite dismissive of Ye these days (He posted on Twitter/X earlier this year: “kanye on bleachers release date is hilarious little cry baby bitch”). But Antonoff, like so many others, was once a fan, which made the rapper’s downfall all the more disappointing. Back in 2018 when Ye controversially began supporting Donald Trump, Antonoff described Ye as the kind of icon “who on a gut level let you down in a way that you never thought possible,” both politically and artistically.

“It’s so emotional what’s going on with Kanye for all of us. I tried to explain it to my therapist,” he said at the New Yorker festival (via Vulture), to laughter from the crowd. “You guys can react however you want, but dead seriously—my therapist is older and she sees Kanye as someone she hears about in the news. I said, ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand.’ His music, everything he does, he’s done so many incredible things, artistically.”

Antonoff continued, “There’s a crazy grieving going on because everyone I know—first of all, we so deeply disagree with his politics. Forgetting his politics, the way he’s using his position. But then also what’s clearly mental illness. It feels a little like what we went through with Amanda Bynes where we’re sort of looking at our culture and our press and saying, ‘You guys gotta pull the plug here.’ All that aside, I have to say that because at this point in time that’s a name that when it comes out enough there are things that I feel a duty to say about that. And it hurts.”