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Kanye West on his mother’s death: “If I had never moved to L.A. she’d be alive.”

Kanye West still blames himself for his mother’s death, telling Q Magazine in a new interview that it could have been avoided if he hadn’t moved to Los Angeles.

“If I had never moved to L.A. she’d be alive,” he also told Q. “I don’t want to go far into it because it will bring me to tears.”

Kanye’s mother Donda followed him to L.A. in the mid-aughts to manage his career. She died in 2007 at age 58 from complications during a plastic surgery procedure. Kanye’s continued guilt over his mom’s death shouldn’t come as a major surprise, given her death’s influence on 808s and Heartbreak and her role in “Only One.” His remarks in Q are nearly identical to those he made in an XXL essay five years ago. He wrote: “When I moved to L.A., she moved to L.A. And she wound up in a place that would eat her alive. Even if I stayed in New York, it wouldn’t have been like that. If I had lived in New York, she’d still be here.”