Yeez Louise, that's a lot of ugly sneakers

I'm the first to admit that, when it comes to popular music, I'm something of a fuddy duddy. 

Oh, I'm not a complete and utter fuddy duddy, but a minor league one nonetheless.

I'm not sitting around mooning over why Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis aren't more popular. I don't sing Patti Page tunes in the shower. (Okay. Once in a while, I may break out into Old Cape Cod. But I promise you I have never, ever, ever in a million years performed a shower warble of How Much Is That Doggy in the Window.)

I can make fun of Lawrence Welk and his full cast, from Myron Floren to the Luffly Lennon Sisters. 

And while I still enjoy many of the performers I loved 50+ years ago - Tom Rush, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Elton John - I like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles just fine. In a couple of weeks, I'm going to see Lewis Capaldi. 

But.....

But....

Not that an old white woman is the audience, but I don't care for/appreciate/get rap. And while I understand that a lot of folks consider him a genius, I don't care for/appreciate/get Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West; latterly known as Yeezy - I think). 

And if I don't enjoy his music, I really don't think much of his fashion. 

I don't know if he still has his clothing line, but my reaction when I first saw it was something along the lines of this is some fugly stuff. (Insider info: One of my closest friends was a lead buyer for a very high end retail firm. I won't name names, but think Dallas. The store did business with Kanye - they were somewhat forced into it [I can't remember the deets] - and he was difficult to work with. And not many of the dedicated followers of fashion who dropped tens of thousands of dollars a month at the store would have been caught dead wearing anything "designed" by Kanye.)

If his clothing line was fugly, well, bring on Yeezy footwear, the latest of which looks like an unhappy meeting of Crocs and Edvard Munch's The Scream. And they certainly don't look like they'd offer the kind of support this old lady needs. Talk about ankle-breakers!

But Yeezy sneakers are popular. If no one wears them, collectors collect them and scalpers scalp them. And they cost a ton more than Crocs.

A few years ago, I was walking up Newbury Street and passed a large crowd gathering in front of a store. I asked one of the waiters what he was waiting for. I thought at first that he told me that Kanye West was coming, but then I figured out that it was some new edition of Yeezys that were hitting the shelves. 

Yeezys have helped make Ye richie rich. And they helped swell the coffers at Adidas, which had a deal with Ye that went south when Ye started spewing crackpot antisemitism, Adidas - a German company - was pushed to drop their arrangement. Which stuck the company with a Yeezy inventory worth $1.3B.

Stored in warehouses around the world, the sneakers are a reminder of the once-fruitful tie between Adidas and Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye. Since the first Yeezy Boost 750 shoe dropped in February 2015, his Yeezy brand became a defining force in the sportswear industry and an incredibly lucrative cornerstone for Adidas. (Source: NY Times)

Since January, Adidas has been headed by CEO Bjorn Gulden, who's been spending some of his get-acquainted time trying to figure out what to do with all those Yeezys. 

Mr. Gulden said he and his team were still weighing their options, including the idea of potentially selling the inventory and donating the profits “to do something good.” He said the shoes most likely wouldn’t be destroyed.

Getting rid of the Yeezys is complicated.

Selling the inventory puts the coveted sneakers into the market, and Ye is contractually entitled to his share of the profits. Giving the inventory away puts it to "good use," and there goes Ye's share (yay!), but there goes any profits that would go to do-gooding. 

Destroying the sneakers seems totally wrong-headed. Surely, there are direly poor folks throughout the world - some of them perhaps (blessedly) completely unaware of who Ye is and what cra stuff he stands for - who could use a pair of colorful Scream-Crocs. Not to mention the toxic sludge that would be produced by shredding/burning/whatevering those puppies. 

While Adidas is grappling with plenty of other issues, the Yeezy line was a "cornerstone" of their business, contributing as much as half-a-billion to their bottom line. 

“Losing the Yeezy business is so hard,” [Fulden] told reporters on Wednesday, praising the creativity of the collaboration on multiple levels, including the design, marketing and its use of social media and apps.

“There is no other Yeezy business in the market,” he said. “The people who think you can just replace this with something else — you can’t.”

I'll take Gulden's word that you can't just slot in another big name for Ye and get the same results. But maybe the next time around, they can come up with something that isn't quite as ugly.