Ye just released a lyric-less version of “Heil Hitler,” and Spotify took it down again—igniting new questions in the platform’s growing free speech firestorm.
The rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, quietly dropped an instrumental cut of the track under the new title “The Heil Symphony.” The release came without lyrics and contains only orchestral music. Despite lacking the explicit lyrics that drew backlash earlier this month, The Dallas Express detected that Spotify removed the instrumental shortly after its May 20 release.
DX previously reported that the original “Heil Hitler” track, featured on Ye’s album Cuck, was scrubbed from Spotify and SoundCloud shortly after its release in May. The original version included explicit references to Nazism, Ye’s estrangement from his children, and closed with an audio excerpt of Adolf Hitler.
However, “The Heil Symphony” included none of that—raising a critical point in the debate: if the song had no lyrics, why was it removed?
Moreover, why has a solely instrumental song been removed from the platform while speeches from Hitler continue to stream?
Free speech advocates have sounded the alarm since the first version was taken down.
“Still, platforms that claim to value free expression should mean it and strive to moderate content in a fair, transparent, and consistent way,” said Aaron Terr, director of Public Advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in an earlier statement to DX. “That’s hard to do when a platform has vague and subjective rules, like Spotify’s ban on content that ‘incites violence or hatred’ toward certain groups.”
Terr added that “drawing lines is especially difficult when it comes to music and other art forms, which often thrive on provocation or grapple with dark subject matter.”
Terr’s comments were partly predicated on the fact that while Spotify has rules that prohibit hate speech, the platform previously took strong pro-free speech positions in 2021 and 2022 during two controversies surrounding The Joe Rogan Experience, COVID policy, and race.
The original “Heil Hitler” was consistent with the themes of estrangement, public vilification, and cultural nihilism that appear throughout Cuck. This album also includes songs like “WW3” and “Cousins,” the latter of which contains an unsettling personal confession.
Jewish organizations have been critical of Heil Hitler.
“Kanye West’s release of a song entitled ‘Heil Hitler’ on VE Day, the anniversary of the defeat of the Nazi regime, is hate speech, pure and simple—totally in line with the despicable messages we now expect from West,” CEO of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jim Berk said, per Billboard.
Spotify did not respond to a request for comment for this story.