It was all quiet on the nepo baby front until North and Chicago West, who are 11 and six years old respectively, released a single called ‘BOMB’ with their father Kanye West.
Perhaps you were unaware that North West’s discography includes as many as 21 songs or that she is listed as a musician on Wikipedia. Yes, the four children of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West – who were married between May 2014 and March 2022 – are afforded experiences, opportunities and advantages that most children could only dream of.
In 2020, North famously sang ‘what are those? Those are clothes’ during her father’s Yeezy fashion show in a clip that went viral and later featured on Keeping Up With The Kardashians. In 2023, she made her acting debut as the voice of Mini in PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie.
In May, she performed as Young Simba during The Lion King’s 30th anniversary concert in LA and made headlines around the world. Now, she is the star of her father’s latest music video and is listed as a featured artist.
The question, however, is whether all of this is as wonderful as it sounds? In my humble opinion, it's really not. When North performed at the Yeezy show in 2020, which was her first ever live performance, she was laughed at by millions of people and accused of copying the viral star ZaZa’s song ‘What I do?’ – something Kim addressed on Keeping Up With The Kardashians where she credited ZaZa as North’s inspiration.
When North performed in The Lion King, she was torn apart by online trolls for her singing abilities and accused of taking the role off a more worthy child with a background in performing arts.
In the West family’s latest collaboration, North is seen driving a car at high speed through a desert alongside several puppet-like creatures. She sings ‘You know me, I’m the bomb’ as well as another verse in Japanese. Later on in the music video, Chicago appears with two space buns in her hair and sings, ‘It’s Chicago, you know I’m the one. I like to have fun. I like to go to the beach. I like the sun.’
‘BOMB’ has been called ‘terrible’, ‘child labour’ and ‘2.31 minutes of my life I’ll never get back’ by listeners on social media. The comments beneath the video on YouTube are not much better. One person commented, ‘What did bro tell the AI?’, while another reflected on the decline of Kanye’s music asking, ‘How did we go from "Runaway" and "Ghost Town" to this?’. Another simply wrote, ‘I hate my life, I can’t believe I exist in a time where this was made.’
To all intents and purposes, ‘BOMB’ could be a self-made music video created by siblings in any home around the world. I for one once wrote a song called ‘copyright fraud, it happens when you copy’ and filmed myself singing it on my Nikon waterproof camera.
However, this is not a home video. It’s a high-spec, CGI-enhanced professional music video that has garnered more than 1.1 million views in a single day.
While some of the backlash leveraged at all of these performances is grounded in fairness – it is an unfathomable creative catalogue to amass before the age of 12 – we must remember that the person being debated and critiqued is a child. Would you hold your own children, siblings, nieces or pupils to the same standard? How would you feel if an 11-year-old you know was mocked, scorned and ridiculed on the internet in the same way? Famous or not, North is 11 years old.
The question then becomes about who is responsible. By Kim and Kanye giving their children opportunities that should only be afforded to adults and thrusting them onto the world stage before they've even reached puberty, they're are opening them up to adverse and wholly disproportionate criticism.
As such, North is being treated like an adult in the very worse sense. While we would like to believe that Kim and Kanye try to shield her from the backlash (and in fairness, the comments are switched off on North's TikTok account which is managed by an adult and shared with Kim), it's clear that North knows how to navigate the internet and may well discover the tirade of comments and articles herself. It's not clear how she will cope.
I have heard several adults express strong opinions about North – who already has 19.3 million followers on TikTok – in a way that is nothing short of unnerving. She is often called ‘a brat’, ‘annoying’ and ‘talentless’ and she is barely old enough to be in secondary school.
Who, then, do these A-list experiences and career opportunities really benefit? As the first born child of two of the most famous people in the world, North was never going to lead a normal life. She was always going to have the most Christmas presents, the best Halloween costumes and be able to brush shoulders with any of her idols if she wanted to. That’s not fair, but it’s also nothing new.
Nor is it fair, however, for her to be treated with widespread contempt by adults on the internet just because her parents are famous. If this is how she's being treated as a child, it doesn't bear thinking about how she will be treated as a teenager – or indeed an adult. In a world where fame can be dehumanising, Kim and Kanye should think twice before they offer her another big break.
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across pop culture, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things TV for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow shows with equal respect).