Kanye West Offers Town Millions Of Dollars To Change Its Name

Apparently, Kanye West is ready to spend some cash as he goes through his divorce from Kim Kardashian. According to a local newspaper, the rapper and fashion mogul is willing to part with a chunk of savings in exchange for a name change from an upstate New York town.

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The Rye Record, the local paper for Rye, New York, a city with a population estimated at around 15,700, says it received information from a Kanye West source that claims the rapper has set his eyes on Rye. The publication says that he’d donate somewhere around $100 million — 10 percent of his estimated billion-dollar net worth — “to erase both the City and School bond debt in full” in exchange for dropping the letter R from the name of the city. We’ll be honest, we do like the sound of Ye, New York.

Rye is the youngest city in the state, chartered in 1942. Aside from possibly Kanye West in the future, the city claims John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, actors Jason and Justine Bateman, First Lady Barbara Bush (who married President George H.W. Bush in Rye), and comedian Nick Kroll as some of its famous past residents.

“Kanye isn’t into L.A.’s fakeness right now,” the tipster shares. “People are so quick to judge him and he’s a really sensitive dude. He needs to live somewhere where people don’t care that he’s famous.” Apparently, West has even already filed paperwork to start the process of changing the city’s name, although we have no idea what that paperwork would exactly do or what it means to file said papers. The source also says that he’s looking to buy a home, a studio, and a Sunday Service headquarters in the area as well. If West did want to escape the west coast, we’re not entirely sure why he wouldn’t just go to one of his multi-million dollar properties in Wyoming instead of setting up Ye, New York.

Of course, we here at Gossip Cop are more than familiar with surprising insights from anonymous sources. Between investigating the claims made by unnamed insiders in the tabloids to the tips we get from untraceable snitches, we’ve heard some wild things. For example, we looked into a report from a West source that said he was dropping tens of millions of dollars to buy up land in Wyoming to build a doomsday bunker/complex last year. That didn’t come true, unsurprisingly, as celebrity real estate moves are generally pretty big news. It’s funny to think about living in a place named after Kanye West that has no actual connection to the rapper, but this looks like nothing more than a silly joke as it stands now.

But hey, Johnny Depp once bought a French village, so who’s to say that Kanye West can’t buy a city?