The rapper seemed to have blown his career up two years ago with a string of offensive comments. But now he has another album at No 1

Over the course of about a month in late 2022, Kanye West seemingly blew up his career for ever. Weeks of increasingly erratic behaviour culminated in a slip into full-blown reactionary populism with a series of offensive stunts, including but not limited to: wearing a White Lives Matter T-shirt , reviving hoary antisemitic tropes about Jews controlling the media, and threatening on X (then Twitter) to go “death con 3” on Jews .

Within weeks, West’s record label and publisher – Universal Music Group and Sony Music Publishing, respectively – terminated their contracts with him; he was dropped by his agency, CAA; and Adidas, Balenciaga and Gap canned their continuing collaborations. The vast majority of his $2bn (£1.6bn) net worth evaporated overnight. Kanye Is Never Coming Back From This read the headline of one Rolling Stone article at the time.

Shaad D’Souza is a freelance culture journalist

Choreographer Kenrick Sandy and composer Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante’s acclaimed troupe are back with a pulsating new piece, inspired by grime, jungle and carnival

Sunday afternoon in Tower Hamlets, east London, and the room is full of teenagers hammering out a hip-hop routine, their trainers squeaking rhythmically on the floor. It looks pretty good, but Kenrick Sandy steps in. He’s a powerful presence, with a stillness about him and eyes that you feel are looking into your soul. “I’m listening to the weight distribution,” he tells the dancers, the implication being he’s not hearing what he wants. “Feel the move in your body, don’t just copy the steps.” He quizzes them about exactly what the energy of a step is, the difference between sharp, punchy or explosive. And he’s a stickler for the details: are the fingers together or apart? In a fist, is the thumb on top? In the space of 15 minutes they are transformed.

This is how Sandy’s company Boy Blue got so good. Founded in 2001 with composer Michael “Mikey J” Asante, both not long out of school, the company came out of an earlier incarnation, Matrix, a handful of dancers who’d battle against other crews from all over the capital at streetdance events in south London. But while other groups disbanded, or went off to get “proper” jobs, Boy Blue soared. They were soon training a cohort of 50 young dancers; they won an Olivier award in 2007; became an associate company at the Barbican centre; choreographed for the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony; and were reunited with the ceremony’s director Danny Boyle last year on the opening of Manchester’s shiny new Aviva Studios with an ambitious show, Free Your Mind , that mixed The Matrix with Alan Turing and Mancunian pop culture.

Federal investigation comes amid multiple lawsuits including singer Cassie accusing him of rape and physical abuse

The rapper and mogul Sean Combs is facing mounting legal troubles after federal agents searched his properties in Los Angeles and Miami as part of a sex-trafficking investigation.

On Monday morning, US Department of Homeland Security agents in tactical gear and armored vehicles raided two of Combs’s mansions as part of an investigation by federal authorities in New York, sources told the Associated Press.

Joe Conzo Jr spent his teenage years with a camera strapped to him, capturing everything from protests to hip-hop battles in his local neighbourhood

Where once rap tees were used to promote stars like Biggie and Tupac, now the trend for displaying your own face is all the rage

Ariana Atwater, a customer service associate at Bloomingdale’s in New York City, grew up in the US south, where “rap tees” – shirts highlighting hip-hop’s biggest artists – were nearly ubiquitous. The 32-year-old remembers buying Bow Wow and Jeezy garb, but last autumn, she added a far less famous face to her wardrobe: her boyfriend, Aaron.

Atwater customised a $30 (£25) shirt with his name in huge, orange ombré text above images of his face and wore the shirt as a surprise for his birthday. “I just wanted to find something cool and cute to celebrate him,” she says.

(Interscope)
The Philadelphia rapper takes her Missy Elliott-gone-Sesame Street vibe to a darker place on her debut album proper

Hailed as her generation’s answer to Missy Elliott, Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack has been celebrated not just for her lyrical dexterity but for her commitment to goofiness. Her exuberant debut mini-album, Whack World (2018), clocked in at 15 one-minute tracks; a clutch of EPs and some standalone singles consolidated her effervescence across different genres.

Last year’s award-winning thriller/spoof documentary about Whack, Cypher , also attested to the weirdness that the creative nonconformist has experienced during her rise. She has trailed World Wide Whack , her official debut LP , with a trio of tracks – one ditty about her smell ( Chanel Pit ); a funky cut about singing in the shower ( Shower Song ); and a moving tune about feeling “broken”. The track’s title, 27 Club, refers to Whack not joining the set of artists who died at that age (she is now 28).

She’s a muse to Beyoncé, a champion of Lego and raps about her imaginary friend – but behind the whimsy is a street-hardened MC confronting grief and depression

• This article contains discussion of suicide

There’s a video of Tierra Whack filmed when she was 15, dressed in dull pink knitwear on the corner of a Philadelphia street, surrounded by older guys smoking weed. “Rapping is my destiny / Especially for these hysterectomies who be testing me / You deaf to me / You’re not hearing what I’m sharing like an uncaring parent …” Words pour out of her in an a cappella freestyle to camera, more performance poetry than rap, voice morphing from one persona to another – one of those mic-drop, jaw-drop moments where you see a new star gather light in real time.

Twelve years later, and the knitwear is bright and expensive, she’s a muse to Beyoncé and has become one of the most singular rappers and singers in America. Her 2018 debut album, Whack World, felt like a piece of performance art with 15 multi-genre tracks each exactly one minute long; her feature film last year, Cypher, flipped the tired fly-on-the-wall music documentary format into a satirical horror movie about conspiracy theories and selling out. While many rappers align themselves with luxury brands, Whack did a campaign with Lego, and her brilliant second album, World Wide Whack, out this week, shows off that whimsy on songs about an imaginary friend, dates at the cinema and singing in the shower. But it is also devastatingly honest about her experience of depression. “I’m 28 now – I was supposed to kill myself when I was 27,” she tells me in the London offices of her record label. “But I decided to keep going.”

Coldplay become act to headline most times with their fifth top slot, while Shania Twain is booked for the Sunday teatime ‘legend’ set as the lineup is announced

Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA will headline Glastonbury 2024, a diverse spread of A-list artists matched by a strong supporting lineup across the festival including Little Simz, LCD Soundsystem and Burna Boy, plus Shania Twain in the always-jubliant “legend” slot.

Much loved by Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis who once said they can “call in and do the milking any time” on his Worthy Farm site, Coldplay continue their longstanding relationship with the festival, becoming the first act to headline the Pyramid stage five times. They launched themselves into pop-rock’s big leagues with their first headline performance in 2002 when they had only released one album, and have since headlined in 2005, 2011 and 2016, as well as doing a livestreamed performance to an empty Pyramid stage field in lieu of a 2021 festival cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Paul Mescal spoke Gaeilge at the Baftas, Cillian Murphy at the Oscars. Films are being written in it, dramas acted in it – and rappers are translating drug lingo into it. Our writer hails an extraordinary renaissance

Grindr, Saghdar agus Cher is a modern play about hook-ups, dating apps and going on a bender. But the most current thing about it may be that the piece, staged by LGBTQ+ collective Aerach Aiteach Gaelach, is performed entirely in Irish.

“We just wanted to show that these things are happening in Irish,” co-writer Ciara Ní É says of the drama, which lands in Dublin this week. “We have slang, we have messy nights, and it’s all as Gaeilge ” – that is, in the Irish language. “It’s real in that sense,” she continues. “These things happen around the country regularly.” The title only barely needs translating (“saghdar” means cider), but the show itself is unapologetically in the native tongue. “It has English subtitles. We do try to be accessible,” says Ní É.