People say it's all too easy for nonentities like me to poke fun at celebrities by taking their candid ramblings out of context and treating them as serious attempts at communication. So let's do that! Here's some Kanye West quotes from a recent interview with the New Zealand DJ Zane Lowe from BBC Radio 1:
On making music that's confrontational"So I'm gonna take music and I'm going to try to make it three-dimensional, like [long pause], like in Star Wars, and the hologram'll pop up out of R2-D2. I'ma try to make something that jumps up, and affects you, in a good or bad way."
On not intending puns"Everybody is like, bound to these-no pun intended, they're bound to..."
"I'm gonna try to push Pusha T-no pun intended once again. This keeps happening to me."
On radio"I was talking to Frank Ocean about this and said, like, my mom got arrested for the sit-ins, and now we're more like the sit-outs, like sit off of radio, and say, 'Hey, radio, come to us.' We need to find something new because it's being controlled in a way and manufactured in a way that really awesome artists can make amazing music and not break as far past as something that's very formulaic."
On race and being marginalized"I've reached a point in my life where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting. And I've got to a point that Michael Jackson did not break down. I have reached the glass ceiling. As a creative person, as a celebrity. When I say that, it means, I want to do product, I am a product person. Not just clothing, but water bottle design, architecture, everything, you know, that you could think about. And I've been at it for 10 years, and I look around, and I say, wait a second, there's no one in this space that looks like me, and if they are, they're quiet as f--k. So that means, wait a second, now we're seriously, like, in a civil rights movement."
On fashion"Me and Virgil [Abloh] are in Rome, giving designs to Fendi, over and over, and getting our designs knocked down ... [We] brought the leather jogging pants six years ago to Fendi, and they said 'no.' How many mother--kers you done seen with a leather jogging pant?"
On hip-hop's cultural dominance"When I see Hedi Slimane, and it's all like, okay, this is my take on the world. Yeah, he's got some nice $5,000 jeans in there. It's some nice ones here and there, some good s--t here and there. But we culture. Rap the new rock and roll. We culture. Rap is the new rock and roll. We the rock stars. [Zane Lowe: "It's been like that now for a minute."] It's been like that now for a minute, Hedi Slimane! It's been like that now for a minute. We the rock stars, and I'm the biggest of all of them."
- via Forrest Wickman, Slate.com, 23 September 2013I love the idea that someone had to think up thematic captions for Mr West's somewhat elliptical thought processes. And are leather jogging pants a thing now? I mean, other than in Bavaria? I caught a bit of West's performance on the BBC's Later With Jools Holland last Friday night. It might just be my age showing, but I couldn't help but think his performance would have been far more enjoyable if (1) the camera shifted slightly to the right to focus on the tremendous soul vocalist Charlie Wilson (formerly lead singer of the Gap Band) accompanying West, who really has a fantastic set of pipes, and then (2) the producers turned off West's microphone so we didn't have to listen to him droning on about how cross he is about things. But what would I know, right?
See also:
Music: Later With Jools Holland s38 e05, 5 May 2011
Music: Later... is 250, 23 October 2010
Music: Wireless Festival 2008, 6 July 2008
Music: Concert for Diana, 13 July 2007
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