Kanye West Interview with 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen.
A conversation between Kanye West and 12 Years A Slave director Steven McQueen (McQueen also created the backing visuals for Kanye's "Blood on the Leaves" performance at the VMAs.) The two covered a wide range of topics, including Yeezus, the Grammys, the video for "Bound 2", Kanye's 2002 car wreck, and much more. Check out excerpts below and read the full thing here.
MCQUEEN: Talk to me a little bit about Yeezus. The album before that one, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was a phenomenal success. Did that wear on your mind when you went in to make Yeezus?
WEST: Yeah! So I just had to throw it all in the trash. I had to not follow any of the rules because there was no way to match up to the previous album. Dark Fantasy was the first time you heard that collection of sonic paintings in that way. So I had to completely destroy the landscape and start with a new story. Dark Fantasy was the fifth installment of a collection that included the four albums before it. It's kind of the "Luke, I am your father" moment. Yeezus, though, was the beginning of me as a new kind of artist. Stepping forward with what I know about architecture, about classicism, about society, about texture, about synesthesia—the ability to see sound—and the way everything is everything and all these things combine, and then starting from scratch with Yeezus ... That's one of the reasons why I didn't want to use the same formula of starting the album with a track like "Blood on the Leaves," and having that Nina Simone sample up front that would bring everyone in, using postmodern creativity where you kind of lean on something that people are familiar with and comfortable with to get their attention. I actually think the most uncomfortable sound on Yeezus is the sound that the album starts with, which is the new version of what would have been called radio static. It's the sonic version of what internet static would be—that's how I would describe that opening. It's Daft Punk sound. It was just like that moment of being in a restaurant and ripping the tablecloth out from under all the glasses. That's what "On Sight" does sonically.
MCQUEEN: So Yeezus was about throwing away what people want you to do—the so-called "success"—so you could move on to something else.
WEST: It's the only way that I can survive. The risk for me would be in not taking one—that's the only thing that's really risky for me. I live inside, and I've learned how to swim through backlash, or maintain through the current of a negative public opinion and create from that and come through it and spring forth to completely surprise everyone—to satisfy all believers and annihilate all doubters. And at this point, it's just fun.
MCQUEEN: I heard about all of this controversy that came to surround [the "Bound 2" video], which I had to sort of scratch my head about. I mean, call me silly, but when I saw that video for "Bound 2," I just thought to myself, "It's just a video. It's obviously a sort of romantic video of him and his partner, and it's a bit tongue-in-cheek."
WEST: Yeah. I think all that stuff around it is just that: controversy. I think people are afraid of dreams, and that video is one of the closest things to the way that dreams look and feel, or the way joy looks and feels, with the colors. You know, I think there are rules to fashion, with the all-black everything, and rules to art, with white galleries. There are rules to how a lot of things are: the concrete jungle, stone pavement, brick walls. There are even rules to what a Brooklyn apartment looks like. But this video completely didn't respect any of those rules whatsoever. [laughs] It's a dream, and I think the controversy comes from the fact that I don't think most people are comfortable with their own dreams, so it's hard for them to be comfortable with other people's dreams. I mean, look, it took some time for us to be comfortable with a walking, talking mouse, but that became an icon. So this stuff, what I'm doing now, is the beginning of me throwing out what it means to be a rapper—you know, with the gold chain ...
MCQUEEN: To me, "Bound 2" looked like a Prince video. Aesthetically, it had that kind of feel. It wouldn't have looked out of place if it were part of Purple Rain [1984].
WEST: Well, I'd be biased to think that the community of Geminis is the most consistently in tune with what their spirit is telling them to do or why they have breath in their lungs. But I do think that creative Geminis—Tupac, Biggie, Prince, Miles Davis, all being Geminis—have, throughout history, been really in tune with those things. You know, some different friends of mine have been showing me these interviews that Tupac did and how they're very simple and to the point. I watched them, and one of the things that Tupac kept saying is that he wanted thugs to be recognized. Now Jay-Z is a multi-hundred-millionaire who came from the streets, so Tupac's mission, in a way, has been realized. But my mission is very different from Tupac's—and I'm not Tupac. But I think that when I compare myself to Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, or whoever, it's because I'm trying to give people a little bit of context to the possibilities that are in front of me, as opposed to putting me in the rap category that the Grammys has put me in. In no way do I want to be the next any one of them. But I am the first me. So I only mention those other names to try to give people a little bit of context.
MCQUEEN: It actually stunned me to find out that you've never won Best Album at the Grammys. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but it's kind of odd, considering what you've done in music over the last decade.
WEST: I wasn't even nominated for Best Album this year. This year, I only got two nominations by the Grammys: for Best Rap Album and Best Rap Song.
MCQUEEN: Well, that's my problem with all this stuff. It's ghettoization—and I'm talking about country as much as rap. It's all just music. And I've got a problem with people kind of trying to categorize it, where it's either good or it's bad. I find it all odd, to be honest. Have you ever been nominated for Best Album?
WEST: I've been nominated for Best Album maybe three times. I made Dark Fantasy and Watch the Throne less than a year apart and neither of them got nominated. "Ni**as in Paris" [off Watch the Throne] wasn't nominated for Best Song either. But let's go into the fact that I have the most Grammys of any 36-year-old or 40-year-old or whatever, and I've never won a Grammy outside of the Rap or R&B categories. "Jesus Walks" lost Best Song to some other song; "Ni**as in Paris" wasn't nominated in that category. But those are the labels that people want to put on you. People see you in a certain way, so if I was doing a clothing line that had rock tees in it or whatever we just did for the "Yeezus" tour, which sells $400,000 of stuff in two days ... You know, I like Shame [2011] as much as 12 Years a Slave, but Hollywood likes the idea of a black director directing 12 Years a Slave more than it likes the idea of a black director directing Shame.
MCQUEEN: Let's go deep very quickly then: Talk to me about who you were and who you've become—both before and after your accident, the car crash. Who are those two people, Kanye before and Kanye after? Are they different people? Was there a seismic change in who you were after you nearly lost your life?
WEST: I think I started to approach time in a different way after the accident. Before I was more willing to give my time to people and things that I wasn't as interested in because somehow I allowed myself to be brainwashed into being forced to work with other people or on other projects that I had no interest in. So simply, the accident gave me the opportunity to do what I really wanted to do. I was a music producer, and everyone was telling me that I had no business becoming a rapper, so it gave me the opportunity to tell everyone, "Hey, I need some time to recover." But during that recovery period, I just spent all my time honing my craft and making The College Dropout. Without that period, there would have been so many phone calls and so many people putting pressure on me from every direction—so many people I somehow owed something to—and I would have never had the time to do what I wanted to.
MCQUEEN: So basically, it allowed you to focus, and you realized at a certain point that it was now or never—and that you had to do it now.
WEST: Yes. It gave me perspective on life—that it was really now or 100 percent never. I think that people don't make the most of their lives. So, you know, for me, right now it seems like it's the beginning of me rattling the cage, of making some people nervous. And people are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice in some way or make me look like I'm a lunatic or pinpoint the inaccuracies in my grammar to somehow take away from the overall message of what I'm saying ...
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