Kanye West and The Game got criticized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for using a skinned monkey picture to advertise their collaborative new track ‘Eazy’.
The rappers posted the first image ahead of the release of ‘Eazy’ on Friday (January 14), captioning it, “My life was never easy.” Although Instagram subsequently labeled the post as “sensitive content,” the pair has since uploaded similar photos to promote their tune, with The Game even altering his profile picture to the skinned primate.
“The photo is reminiscent of the monkeys PETA has found, sometimes heads, sometimes hands, sometimes the whole body, in meat markets around the world, and it makes it clear that when you remove the fur you can’t miss that there’s a person in there, that they are fellow primates, and do not belong to us to abuse for any purpose,” PETA President Ingrid Newkirk told Billboard.
So yet, neither Kanye nor The Game has commented.
West originally hinted at the existence of ‘Eazy’ earlier this week, indicating in a taped phone chat with DJ Premier – which designer Tracey Mills published on Instagram – that he wanted to release the song. Pusha T and producer Mike Dean was also in the studio with West and The Game.
It’s unclear whether ‘Eazy’ will appear on a future album by West and/or The Game, although it was revealed earlier this month that West has begun work on the follow-up to his 2021 album, ‘DONDA,’ with the working title of ‘DONDA 2’.
