Photos: Kanye West's dark photoshoot for Interview Magazine

PRINT
What's there left to say about Kanye West?
Certainly, West himself would have plenty to say.
After all, he's the guy who, during an NBC
telethon to benefit the victims of Hurricane
Katrina, proclaimed, off script, that "George Bush
doesn't care about black people." He's the guy
who stormed the stage at the 2009 MTV Video
Music Awards and announced that his good friend
Jay-Z's significant other, Beyoncé, should have
won the prize just bestowed upon the perpetually
in faux-awe Taylor Swift. He's the guy who, in
front of the large fabricated-mountain set on his
recent "Yeezus" tour, has alternately taken aim at
Hedi Slimane, Bernard Arnault, François-Henri
Pinault, and Nike; likened himself to Steve Jobs,
Walt Disney, and Michelangelo; embarked on a
long and winding monologue about Lenny Kravitz
(at which Kravitz was present); and asked Google
head Eric Schmidt to invest in his design firm
Donda (named after West's late mother)—all while
still retaining the level-eyed insight to hold Le
Corbusier and Q-Tip as inhabitors of similarly lofty
creative planes.
A lot of it, of course, is just old-fashioned "I'm the
Alpha with no Omega" hip-hop theater. But some
of it seems to emanate from some deeper, less
performative place for West. Lest we forget that
before he was a pop-star polymath, he was an in-
demand producer whose aspirations to become a
rapper in his own right were thoroughly and
consistently dismissed by the very people who
were profiting from his skills as a songwriter and
beat-maker. He's also the guy who, after a near-
fatal car crash in 2002, turned the experience
into a song called "Through the Wire," which he
rapped while still recovering from the accident,
audibly struggling to spit out rhymes with his jaw
wired shut. And he's the guy who, over the last
decade, has turned out six creatively diverse,
distinctively classic solo albums filled with almost
as many left turns as hits, from the earnest grit of
2004's The College Dropout ("Through the Wire,"
"Jesus Walks") to the lush musicality of 2005's
Late Registration ("Touch the Sky," "Gold
Digger"), from the anthemic grandeur of 2007's
Graduation ("Stronger," "Good Life," "Can't Tell
Me Nothing") to the auto-tuned poetry of 2008's
808s & Heartbreak ("Love Lockdown,"
"Heartless"), the brilliantly realized rushes of
bombast and vulnerability on 2010's My Beautiful
Dark Twisted Fantasy ("Runaway," "Power," "All of
the Lights"), and the lean, industrial future-soul of
his latest album, Yeezus ("Black Skinhead,"
"Blood on the Leaves," "Bound 2"). Over the
course of that sustained creative run—an almost
unprecedented one in the world of urban music,
which thrives off constant novelty—West has
perhaps done more than any other hip-hop artist
to bring the bold experimentation and cathartic
emotional energy of rock 'n' roll to rap. Along the
way, there have also been, amongst myriad other
endeavors, forays into film (such as the 34-
minute extended video for "Runaway" that he
directed) and high-end fashion (he showed two
seasons in Paris), a record label (G.O.O.D. Music),
collaborations with the likes of Riccardo Tisci,
Takashi Murakami, and George Condo, and a joint
album with Jay-Z (2011's Watch the Throne).
You don't have to search far in West's bio for
formative moments. The car accident, his
mother's sudden death in 2007 following a
cosmetic procedure, and the birth this past
summer of his daughter, North, with girlfriend
(and now fiancée) Kim Kardashian have
powerfully punctuated both his life and career
over the last 11 years. The influence of his
parents, who split when West was a toddler, also
looms large. His father, Ray West, was involved
with the Black Panthers, and went on to become
a photojournalist in Atlanta, where Kanye was
born, and his mother was an English professor.
(Kanye's decision to leave school before
graduating, initially a disappointment to Donda,
in part supplied the overarching motif of The
College Dropout.) After his parents divorced,
Donda took an academic appointment in Chicago,
where Kanye spent most of his childhood and
young adulthood. It's also where he first started
writing and producing before moving to New York
to join Jay-Z and Damon Dash's Roc-A-Fella crew.
Yeezus, West says, marks the beginning of a new
period in his life as an artist, though the events of
the last year—North's birth, his engagement to
Kardashian—would seem to indicate that it marks
the beginning of a new period in his life in
general. 12 Years a Slave director Steve
McQueen, in the midst of a life-changing year of
his own, recently caught up by phone with the
36-year-old West in Los Angeles, where he was
camped out briefly between "Yeezus" tour stops.
They spoke not long after the unveiling of the oft-
discussed video for "Bound 2," which was
directed by Nick Knight and features West and a
topless Kardashian writhing on the back of a
motorcycle against a backdrop of orange-y
purple-hued karaoke-video-style landscapes.
STEVE MCQUEEN: It's hard to make beauty.
People often try, and more often than not,
everything starts to feel sort of cheap or kitsch.
But you express yourself in a way that's beautiful.
You can sing from the heart and have it connect
and translate, which is a huge thing for an artist
to be able to do. So my first question is: How do
you do that? How do you communicate in that
way?
KANYE WEST: I just close my eyes and act like I'm
a 3-year-old. [laughs] I try to get as close to a
childlike level as possible because we were all
artists back then. So you just close your eyes and
think back to when you were as young as you can
remember and had the least barriers to your
creativity.
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 ...
MCQUEEN: Well, unfortunately, that is indicative
of what a lot of black performers and leaders have
had to go through. People will often try to
undermine them in a way to take away their
power. You know, when I saw you perform, I was
like, "This guy is gonna die on stage." When I saw
you play, it felt like that—like it could be the last
performance that you give. There's an incredible
intensity to your performances.
WEST: As my grandfather would say, "Life is a
performance." I'm giving all that I have in this life.
I'm opening up my notebook and I'm saying
everything in there out loud. A lot of people are
very sacred with their ideas, and there is
something to protecting yourself in that way, but
there's also something to idea sharing, or being
the person who makes the mistake in public so
people can study that.

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN