Kanye West raps ‘Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax’ on new album

Rapper Kanye West, who has had his brushes with politics, stepped into the 2012 race with a biting comment directed toward Mitt Romney.

{mosads}“I’m just trying to protect my stacks,” West raps on “To the World,” the opening track on the forthcoming album Cruel Summer. “Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax.”

West is the second high-profile rapper to diss the Republican presidential nominee this week.

On Monday, rapper Nicki Minaj said a line she’d rapped, in which she appeared to
endorse Romney, was spoken as one of her alter egos.

West’s line draws attention to Romney’s personal finances, which have been spotlighted by the Obama campaign as evidence that Romney is out of touch with the middle class and hiding things from the American public.

The GOP nominee has said he will release two years of tax returns, provoking some Democrats to speculate that in years prior he paid lower than the 14 percent rate he paid in 2010.

But West is a peculiar source for such criticism — the rapper frequently boasts about his considerable wealth, and in a review of his 2011 album, Watch the Throne, online music magazine Pitchfork wrote that West dropped “multiple namechecks of brands so expensive that you’ve probably never heard of half of them.”

West has gotten himself in trouble in the past for getting involved in politics. During a telethon to benefit New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, he famously said that President George Bush “doesn’t care about black people” as actor Mike Myers looked on uncomfortably. Bush later said it was a low point of his presidency. 

President Obama called West a “jackass” after he rushed the stage at an MTV awards ceremony to protest an award that went to Taylor Swift instead of Beyonce.