“Only one of two things can happen: either I’m gonna be right or I’m gonna be wrong.”
Kanye West was in full football pundit mode in conversation with British director Steve McQueen for the latest issue of Interview Magazine.
McQueen’s latest film, 12 Years A Slave, has just been nominated for nine Oscars, but the focus of their discussion was all Kanye – the effect his car accident had on his music, the ‘Bound 2’ video, being a “creative Gemini” and his endless quest for world domination.
Discussing Kanye’s Grammy nominations this year – Yeezus was nominated for Best Rap Album, but not Best Album – McQueen criticised the “ghettoisation” of music and asked Kanye if he’d been nominated before.
“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 also asked the rapper and producer about interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech and how he dealt with the resulting negativity “mentally, physically, and spiritually”.
West: “It’s funny that you would say “mentally, physically, spiritually” because my answer before you even said that was going to be “god, sex, and alcohol.”
McQueen: People can get lost in all of those things. So how did you arrive where you are now after coming through that period?
West: Well, I don’t have an addictive personality, so that means that I can lean on what might be someone else’s vice just enough to make it through to the next day. You know, just enough religion, a half-cup of alcohol with some ice in it and a nice chaser, and then …
McQueen: A lot of sex. [both laugh]
West: Yeah—a lot of sex. And then I’d make it to the next week.
He also talked about the difference between Yeezus and his previous album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy:
“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.”
Read the full conversation here.
