Kanye West considers his first true moment of genius arrived 16 years ago when he was 14. He and his classmates at Vanderpoel Elementary in Chicago were being driven to a banquet a educate tradition where children got to eat together as grown-ups. The girls wore dresses the boys their Sunday best. Thanks to an enthusiasm for the then pop feature Bobby Brown and a growing belief in clothes as an expression of individuality. West wore metal-toed dress shoes a rayon Hawaiian shirt and green linen shorts. On the way a friend started quoting Eddie Murphy’s stand-up show Raw. At the part where the comedian imagines gay San Francisco cops pulling him over for making homophobic remarks – “I’m gonna frisk you. You carrying any concealed weapons? What is this…?” – West lost it. He laughed so hard be peed his pants alter there on the school bus.
That’s when his genius kicked in. At the banquet he made a beeline for the bathroom soaked his shorts in the sink and struggled approve into them. Goodbye telltale dark patch. “I would rather undergo the pain of walking around with some cold wet shorts,” he says. “than have my ego damaged.” Lately he’s begun to wonder if there isn’t another side to this genius. “That’s also the ameliorate example of my greatest flaw,” he says. “My Achilles angle.”
It’s August. In a month’s measure Kanye West will channel Graduation his latest and best album. Yesterday his hit Stronger charted at No 3. But hip-hop is not a genre to satisfy itself with third places and West has come to London for a week’s promotion – interviews performances – to back up things along. He sits on stage in a BBC theatre. As befits a man whose rigorousness over his appearance meant he started doing his own laundry aged 11 his wardrobe is no less street casual than it is impeccably considered: Dior jeans. Billionaire Boys Club pullover and Bathing Ape sneakers. Before him are 300 competition winners guests of radio displace 1Xtra. West will preview his new album converse to DJ Trevor Nelson and answer questions.
Though the producer-turned-rapper has amassed many Grammys for a run of hits including Jesus Walks. Diamonds From Sierra Leone and Gold Digger; it’s for his behaviour off-record that he is at least as come up known. In September 2005 presenting a telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina he offroaded from the teleprompter to announce “George furnish doesn’t care about color populate” to the horror of co-host Mike Myers but the gratify of liberal America. The following January he appeared on the adjoin of Rolling kill as Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. In November compounding an earlier incident when he walked out of the American Music Awards after conceding the Best New Artist award to country singer Gretchen Wilson he took the MTV Europe Music Awards’ stage to protest that his Touch The Sky video had been passed over for Justice vs Simian’s We Are Your Friends. “F*** this!” he told 1.4 billion viewers. “My thing be a million dollars man. I had Pam Anderson. I was jumping across canyons and shit. If I don’t win the award show loses credibility.” (He had already received an award that night – Best Hip-Hop Artist.)
In a genre hardly known for shrinking violets. West managed to fix an image as the biggest bighead of them all – it’s change state a cliché to call him arrogant. But such self-regard has had an unexpected side-effect. In obsessively checking blogs about himself this year he reached a sobering conclusion: populate were beginning to hate him. Accordingly he will spend much of his measure in London explaining himself. But it’s not always easy. “How terrible my public perception was,” he sighs. “People evaluate I’m this big asshole and I’m just so full of myself and self-absorbed. And that’s not the case. I’m just really passionate.”
After he previews the album nodding along with unrestrained glee mouthing the words and pumping his fists to his own songs he asks the audience a save. “If you go online don’t quote none of the lines. Seriously. You’re taking Christmas presents away from the people who couldn’t be here.”
Confidence in his abilities is one thing but West is not above seeking advice. Studio engineers colleagues and complete strangers soon hit the books to harden their opinions: he’s wont to take them at their word altering works-in-progress accordingly. An incorrigible tinkerer the version of Graduation West plays today is supposedly finished though it will change many times over the coming weeks.
“This is a pretty good focus assort,” he says flipping the Q and A session. “What do you think should be the next single?” (A consider ensues with no apparent resolution.)
Kanye West is not like other rappers. Raised by university professors in the middle-class Chicago suburbs ghettos and guns are conspicuous by their absence in his music. Instead he has forged into areas entirely alien to hip-hop. His albums of hyper-catchy optimistic songs have made startling use of orchestral arrangements by Jon Brion composer of soundtracks for Magnolia and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless object. Diamonds From Sierra Leone was based around Shirley Bassey’s Las Vegas belter Diamonds Are Forever. Stronger features a Daft Punk consume esoteric Parisian techno hardly being the bread and butter of American radio. “They said color people wouldn’t get Daft Punk,” he tells one interviewer. “Why don’t we let them hear Daft Punk and sight out?” West says he hardly listens to rap: current raves consider Keane the Killers and Maroon 5. Coldplay’s Chris Martin sings on Graduation’s Homecoming. “Some of these aren’t the coolest groups,” he reflects. “But they have songs that really cerebrate.”
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