Music

Did Kanye West leak details of a new album on a message board using secret codes and a screen cap?

by Aaron Zorgel

So, this has been all over the Internet for the last two days, and no one (including us) is quite sure what to make of it. The whole thing has “hoax” written all over it, but your inner Kanye fan probably wants it to seem plausible. An image of a computer screen was posted to a forum called “Kanye To The” (seems legit), revealing a tracklist, a title, guests, and a sliver of cover art for a new Kanye West solo album, to be released this year sometime.

There’s about a 0.00009% chance of this being authentic, but let’s speculate. On the off chance that this is credible, we would know that Kanye West will release a solo album called Rich Black American some time in 2013, with at least seven songs on it, featuring contributions from 2 Chainz, Beyoncé, Big Sean, Florence Welch, Frank Ocean, Pusha T and Skrillex.

Assuming this was the work of a troll, like almost anyone with a functioning bullshit detector would do, moderators locked the thread soon after the image was posted. The original poster (username: XXXXXX) then added a series of characters and numbers to another thread on the same forum:

“92413KWPT2CBSJZBKRFWSLCTPTTCLLRRFOLDRTYMBIMM
26
1
172
faith
I do not live in this dimension, I just work for DONDA.”

Huh?! A few fans were hopeful that they’d just received a secret message from the Louis Vuitton Don, so they set to work at decoding the garbled message. Here’s what they came up with:

“9/24/13
Kanye West
Pusha T
2 Chainz
Big Sean
Jay-Z
Beyonce Knowles
Rihanna
Florence Welch
Skrillex
? L
Cyhi The Prynce
Teyana Taylor
? CLL
Rick Ross
Frank Ocean
Lana Del Rey
Toro Y Moi
Bon Iver
? MM”

The original poster then clarified the rest of his message in another post on the same thread:

26 songs
1 film
172 minutes (just under 3 hours)
2 disc.
plus a film disc.”

Most members of the forum were skeptical, until a moderator pointed out that the I.P. address of the original poster was from Paris, where Kanye West was seen shopping with girlfriend Kim Kardashian less than two weeks ago.

What do you guys think? Is this legit, or is it another Illuminati conspiracy theory? Either way, it’s kind of fun to think about. We’ll let you know if this gets confirmed or mythbusted.