If you’ve been anywhere near the internet at all over the past month and a half, the saga of Kanye West has been exhaustively unavoidable, from his Trump tweets to two-hour interviews, all finally culminating late last night with the Wyoming bush party-release of his latest album, ye.

To say the least, it’s been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, and we’ve broken down a timeline of  takes to prove how much of a ride this whole thing has been:

Mid-April: The Trump Tweets

It all started with West blasting Twitter with preachings of “free thought”, retweets of Dilbert creator/famed misogynist Scott Adams, and showing off his turd-trophy of a MAGA hat:

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989227154993963009

This was seen, with right reason, as career suicide. Both fans and detractors saw this as the end of Yeezy, a new low he couldn’t sink any deeper into:

But this is Kanye we’re talking about, notorious for surprising us in the most surprising of ways — including the ability to find a new low to sink to. Enter, my friends…

Early May: The TMZ Interview

The early days of last month saw Kanye dropping a two-hour interview with Charlamagne tha God in an attempt to diffuse and contextualize the brain-vomit he had been tweeting out to the world. It doesn’t matter whether you find the interview interesting or incomprehensible, as any good will he could’ve achieved from it was immediately dust in the wind: that same day, the rapper appeared on TMZ to let everyone know how slavery was, apparently, a choice:

For many, this was the confirmation that Kanye had now cemented himself as a right-wing figurehead:

While some of his famous friends held out hope that maybe, just maybe, this was all a big, egoistic prank from the man who once interrupted a live broadcast to let everyone know that George Bush didn’t care about black people:

Early May Detour: Devil in a New Tesla

Following the quite-justified uproar inspired by his slavery comments, Kanye took a breather from engaging in the directly political, instead taking to social media with the same fervor, only this time to keep trying to slide into Elon Musks’s DMs?

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/992404023197224960

Unfortunately for Kanye, Elon had just announced, with an internet-breaking weight rivaled only by Mr. West himself, that he was no longer on the market; his head currently in the clouds, shooting through space, on its way to Mars with indie-pop internet darling Grimes. That didn’t stop the internet from shipping the trio into Black Mirror fanfictions, however:

Although Musk may never pull Ye closer in the backseat of his Tesla, West still took a page from the king capitalist’s book and set out to recruit brave souls to help in building the multi-industry Yeezy empire… by posting on LinkedIn:

Mid-May: Hints of wokeness?

Although it doesn’t come close to making up for his slavery tirades and support of the alt-right cabal, Kanye, in addition to tweeting out some dorm-room-level philosophical pleas to emancipate ourselves from our phones (advice that West himself should probably take), also tweeted out a full length documentary by left-wing filmmaker Adam Curtis:

Curtis, for those not in the know, is known for his work that exhaustively explores how fascist systems come to be normalized and accepted through the influence of media and culture —which maybe, just maybe, Kanye will learn a thing or two from:

Late May: The DAYTONA Saga

Not only has enough ink already been spilled about the Pusha T-Drake beef that’s swarmed every media outlet since the drop of DAYTONA, but it’s enough of another story entirely that to write about it here would make this exhaustive timeline even more, well, exhausting.

What’s of note here, rather, is that Kanye’s notoriety for announcing projects that never see the light of day  —Remember Cruel Winter? Yeezus Pt. 2? No? What about TurboGrafx 64? — is a trait that kinda put into question that the slew of G.O.O.D. music releases that Kanye promised would ever even come into fruition. DAYTONA might’ve given us the most exciting beef in years, but in this context, what it also gave us was hope that maybe, just maybe, this new Kanye album might actually come out.

This hope was however sullied by a divisive album cover that featured the drug-laced bathroom of Whitney Houston, in the throes of her addictions. Even if Kanye’s new album was to come out, this album art, on top of everything else, had people wondering —from both sides—whether or not this indicated the music would even be in good taste:

Now: ye

And then it happened. Surrounded by horses, campfires, and, uh Candace Owens, Kanye unleashed his newest album onto the world in the wee hours of the Wyoming morning — and despite the long, winding, painful, politically-gross road it took to get here, well… It seems that it might’ve been worth it?

https://twitter.com/ChidobeAwuzie/status/1002577492526411776

The music doesn’t excuse his politics, but it also seems creatively-inspired and politically-muted enough that we might just be able to enjoy it on its own terms and put this whole album-release fiasco behind us — that is, until the inevitable Alex Jones feature on Kids See Ghost.

What really matters, is that after a month and half of this, we can finally log off. Remember outside?