Tremaine Emory says he “felt great” about not “being complicit” after his exit from working with the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
In a new interview with Noah Callahan-Bever for Complex’s IDEA GENERATION, the Denim Tears founder went deep on a number of topics, including the period he spent working with Ye in a variety of roles. In fact, Emory said in the newly released interview that he was with the late Virgil Abloh in Milan when he got the initial call that would ultimately lead to him joining Ye’s team.
“I remember V was just like, ‘Guess you gotta go to Jedi school,’ like a joke,” Emory said of the New York invitation. Abloh, of course, had himself worked alongside Ye earlier into his career.
From there, Emory made a point to note that “everyone’s been fired by Kanye,” so much so that Abloh himself is said to have joked about it at Ye’s wedding. But when it came to first taking that step into Ye’s world, Emory had to navigate that on his own.
“V was a very ‘you gotta figure it out for yourself’ type of dude,” he said. “He was just supportive and he was just like, ‘You’ll learn a lot.’ That was, like, 2016. That was years before things got convoluted on the Ye side of things, in my opinion, and really catty and not nice. So V was super supportive.”
Emory said his work with Ye “started off as consulting” but quickly grew into much more.
“It was a myriad of things,” he explained. “It was really just asking your opinion and then some design. By the end of it, I was, like, creative director of G.O.O.D. Music and brand director of Yeezy.”
Deeper into his IDEA GEN chat, Emory, whose Arthur Jafa collab arrived earlier this year, was asked about his process of cultivating the confidence required to freely participate in the exchange of opinions crucial to Ye’s artistic process, which is known to bring on a “high-pressure” environment for all involved.
“For me, he’s a human being,” Emory said. “He ain’t god, you know what I mean? I’m just like, this is my opinion. If you disagree, cool. I wasn’t so caught up in the rapture of his accomplishments because I just knew I’m accomplished. I have a résumé too. My résumé counts, for me, just like yours counts for you.”
Perhaps inevitably, however, there did come a breaking point, of sorts, in Emory and Ye’s working relationship. While Emory puts the bulk of the blame on those around Ye, he’s still critical of the operation at large, at least as of late.
“I just thought he wasn’t taking care of himself, in my opinion, as far as on the mental health side of things, and the way he was treating people, talking to people,” Emory said. “There was a situation in Uganda. He was screaming at two people. And not that he should scream at anyone, but these two people, he shouldn’t have been screaming at them in front of colleagues. I just was like, ‘You’re bugging. Why are you talking to these two people like this?'”
Still, Emory added, the proverbial “straw” itself is a more complex problem.
“The thing that was a straw wasn’t him,” he said, as seen in the full video below. “It was the people around him that don’t challenge him and hear him say these fucked up things. That’s when I was just like, I stopped going on trips and that’s when I got fired. For years, I was asked to come back. I never went back. There were times where I didn’t care if I was on my last dollar. I wasn’t going back, you know? Because that situation wasn’t changing me.”
See more below.
The status of Emory and Ye’s relationship became a public matter back in 2022, with the former Supreme creative director speaking out over the latter’s mention of Abloh amid a “victim campaign.” That same year, Ye was photographed wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “Tremendez,” a nickname he had given his former collaborator at the time.
In the new Callahan-Bever interview, Emory also reflected on his introduction to Abloh and detailed his thoughts on the idea of legacy as an artist. As I’ve already suggested a few times in this piece, the full thing is out there and quite worth your time.
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