During an interview with GQ, Kanye West says he is not the most popular rapper in Hip Hop.
“Currently that spot is taken,” West says. “Let’s be honest—he got last summer…You know. There’s only one person…Yeah. [Drake] got last summer. And I’d never given it up ’til last summer.”
As part of the question-and-answer, GQ’s Zach Baron also reads West a Page Six excerpt that depicts a wedding rumor:
“Kanye returned one hour before the wedding and didn’t like the all-white bar that was in front of the Gold Toilet Tower. He took a saw and started sawing it in half himself. Two men held the bar stable as he sawed, and sawed, into the bar, defacing the entire front, screaming at everyone around him. He said it looked like a bar from Texas. Then he ordered two pieces of raw wood to be nailed onto the front of the bar. Once the wood was in place, ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it’s art.’ The Italian construction teams looked at this guy and couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”
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West responds to the above quote with his perspective on the wedding.
“For the person that wrote that, were they involved with anything last year that was as culturally significant as the Yeezus tour or that album?” West says. “They didn’t even talk there about the photographs, or the dress, or Andrea Bocelli singing, or the marble tables. They’re like: ‘It’s a gold toilet.’ No. The bathrooms—that usually would be a porta-potty—were wrapped in a fabric that was neutral to match the fort. The bar was terrible, and the wedding planner didn’t approve it with me. I was having issues with this wedding planner the entire time on approvals, and I get there and they threw some weird plastic bar there. So the same materials that were used to cover the bathroom, we said, ‘Let’s just use that, because this is all we have to make the bar look better.’ Which it did, in the end. And anyone knows that you cannot pick up tools yourself, because of—what are those rules about the workers?…Yeah, unions. You can’t do that. It’s illegal. That’s false.”
Kanye West Says His Feelings “Don’t Matter Anymore”
At one point in the interview, West also says that his “feelings don’t matter anymore.”
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“No,” he says. “One of the things that I said at the [wedding] speech was, anyone that’s at this table has had to defend me or Kim or both of us at some point in their life. Ask a boxer: ‘In the third round, when he hit you from the side on your ear, how did that specifically feel?’ You wouldn’t ask a boxer that. Because you know they’re there to fight. Meaning now you know I’m here to fight. I’m here to fight for the re-education of what celebrity is. To say, ‘Yes, we are celebrities, but yes, we’re also innovators, we’re also inventors, we’re also thoughtful.'”
Another wedding topic involves Jay Z and Beyonce, who did not attend West’s wedding.
“All that, I wouldn’t even speak on,” he says. “It doesn’t even matter to me whatsoever, who would show up. Because the most important person to show up there, to me, was Kim. And that’s all that matters to me. I had to fight for that for seven years. But the fact that these other people showed up that are from such different worlds but have done such dynamic things—they’re all, in a way, equal to what Kim has done in TV or what I had done in music. I was so moved that I just wanted people to stop and think they weren’t sitting at a table full of fashion people, they weren’t sitting at a table full of celebrities, they weren’t sitting at a table full of movie directors. It really was a representation of the way we receive information today, post-Internet. And so Page Six can’t overshadow the main point: Carine Roitfeld was sitting next to Kim Kardashian. That alone to me is like the same moment when I brought Mos Def to the studio with Jay Z. It’s about the people, and the fact that they’re from different walks of life, and that they’re working together and not discriminating against each other. There was a class system, and now there’s a creative class system, and I think that’s what you were talking about a bit—the class system of creativity.”
Despite Jay Z not attending his wedding, Kanye West praised the emcee.
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“That’s what I like about Jay,” he says. “He has longevity. He’s still at the top of relevancy from the way he moves, the way he interacts with people, his ability to brush things off of his shoulder and just win at life. He’s the poster child of winning. And I think I was the poster child of, like, fighting and winning. But you always saw the fight. And with Jay, you always saw the win.”
Kanye West Calls Yeezus Start Of “Completely New Era Of Music”
A year removed from Yeezus, West says the album is an important one.
“I think Yeezus is the beginning of a completely new era of music,” he says. It was all new rules. It just broke every rule possible. None of the ideas were popular ideas. Even ‘Bound 2,’ when the video came out, I think people’s apprehension—I mean, it’s the same as any other Kanye West video. You just have colorful bears running around. It was completely morphed and weird and psychedelic and really druggy. I would have just liked to have had more nudity in it. That’s the only thing. I just want to do crazy, colorful shit like that that has more nudity.”
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West adds that he had a purpose on Yeezus.
“Yeezus was extremely purposeful,” he says. “And what came from Yeezus: Paparazzi are nicer to me. The entire fashion industry is nicer to me. I do have a collaboration coming out. Young designers that would go and work at a house now look and say, ‘Wow, maybe we could potentially work at Donda. Maybe we could work for Kanye. Maybe that’s a real thing.’ Because designers that are geared up to only want to work at a French fashion house are completely under the perception that it wouldn’t be cool to work for a celebrity.”
West is moving on from Yeezus, but has not decided when the new project will be released.
“I think most likely September,” he says. “I go back and forth. Like, should it be September or should it be October? Should it be November? When Beyoncé was working on her last album, she took a while. I was thinking it could somehow come out in June, like Yeezus, and just kill it for the summer. But then I’m like, I have to work on Adidas and be with my child.
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“For the new album, one new thing could change everything,” he adds. “I had an idea of the way I wanted to do the album. And then I got a new song that’s so good that the album has to be balanced against it. This song is a song that can be in the club like ‘Don’t Like’ or ‘Niggas in Paris.’ Whereas before I was working on the album and I had these beautiful songs, they were just more songs. They weren’t saying, ‘Okay, tuck your whole summer in.’ They were just saying, ‘Hey, I’m a great musician, I make these beautiful songs, and they have all this meaning, and nobody can make anything that means this much.'”
The interview also features West saying he is more like a blowfish than a shark and that he has missed opportunities because people don’t want to work with a person who was mad when he hit his head on a street sign.
For the full interview, visit GQ.
To see the Kanye West GQ cover, click here.
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