There’s no denying the fact that Kanye West is a fighter! Whether its simply pulling a sweater over a t-shirt and questioning the decision or having to deal with the constant mockery thrown his way by the media, everyday Kanye prepares for the critics by throwing on his boxing gloves.
In his latest spread with GQ, Kanye talks a lot about fighting. Not literally like he almost did with the LAX paparazzi, but for things that he would like to accomplish (i.e. music, fashion, etc), how he had to fight for Kim’s love and how he fights to maintain his level of celebrity.
Yeezus also reveals details from the wedding like how he gave a 45 minute toast about himself, not getting along with the wedding planner, having to re-decorate during the ceremony and more.
Before the wedding, rumors swirled that Jay-Z turned down Ye’s best man offer and he and Beyonce would not be in attendance if the Keeping Up With The Kardashian cameras would be floating around (which they were), Ye addressed those rumors. And in post married life Ye opens up about how he doesn’t post inappropriately on Twitter out of respect for his relationship with Kim and how being a dad and husband makes him happy.
Almost everything you want to know about Kanye is below and some pretty dope pics too.
You got married a week ago. You’re the lead subject in practically every tabloid on the planet right now. Are you comfortable in that position, having that many eyes on you?:
That wasn’t my goal. My goal is just to be respected as a man when I walk down the street with my family. I don’t care what your job is, you’re not gonna talk down to me, you’re not gonna try to get a rise out of me. I’m a man first. And in establishing that, some interesting things have happened. [laughs]
Like that TMZ video from last year, where you’re walking with your pregnant fiancée with your head down to avoid the paparazzi, to the point where you walked into a sign and hit your head. Then TMZ made fun of you for walking into the sign. How do you live like that?:
It’s difficult. And then put on top of that the idea of going and taking meetings with people, and people say, “We don’t want to work with you, because we saw you get mad about running into the sign.”
Does that kind of mockery feel like an effort to de-fang you?:
But also, there’s no fangs. I don’t have fangs. I’m a porcupine. I’m a blowfish. Like, I’m a—what’s the fish that blows up?
A blowfish?:
Yeah. I’m a blowfish. I’m not a shark, I’m a blowfish. So that perfect example about me hitting my head, it’s like a blowfish. I wasn’t coming out of my house going to a paparazzi’s house to attack them. I’m defending my family in front of my own house. I’m defending my name as someone’s screaming something negative at me. That’s a blowfish. People have me pinned as a shark or a predator in some way, and in no way am I that. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. I want to defend people. I want to help people.
Then they say you gave a forty-five-minute toast to yourself:
And what I talked about in it was the idea of celebrity, and celebrities being treated like blacks were in the ’60s, having no rights, and the fact that people can slander your name. I said that in the toast. And I had to say this in a position where I, from the art world, am marrying Kim. And how we’re going to fight to raise the respect level for celebrities so that my daughter can live a more normal life. She didn’t choose to be a celebrity. But she is. So I’m going to fight to make sure she has a better life.
Of course they do:
No. One of the things that I said at the 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.”
Is that the way you feel, that you’re always in the ring?:
Yeah. I’m sitting right here, it’s a fight. I’m fighting with the way I line my words up together and the way I place a sweater on top of a T-shirt. At this point, people know what’s up. People know I’m smart. And people know that, whether it’s SNL or Jimmy Kimmel, it’s a trend to take the piss out of celebrity—just as much of a trend as wearing a gray hoodie or driving a Prius.
You voluntarily married into a celebrity family, right? In 2014, there are no bigger tabloid stars than Kim Kardashian:
In the speech, I talked about the idea of collaboration and all the people involved working together and being able to change things. Meaning there was a time for two or three years where fashion designers wouldn’t give Kim dresses. There was a time they wouldn’t even let me be at shows. Now the idea that Kim is in a Givenchy Couture dress is raising the communication. Because people would be more apt to be like, “Celebrities don’t really have style. Celebrities can’t dress. Celebrities are less educated.” But they haven’t had the chance to be able to break throughand have Carine Roitfeld sitting right there. Carine Roitfeld is the Walt Disney of what Tumblr is today. She is the Kanye West of what Tumblr is today. She’s the single most important person to what street style is today. And she was at the wedding seven seats down from Kim, who is one of the number one fashion plates of today. So I said, “Wow, Carine is seven seats down from Kim. Farnaz [Farjam], the producer of the Kardashians and the producer of The Real World, is four seats down from [director] Steve McQueen. And four seats, because in between them is Hosain [Rahman] from Jawbone.” This is what I talked about. That was not a forty-five-minute speech to myself. Do you realize what that means for those people to be in that close of a proximity to each other?
But if you read a lot of the tabloid coverage, the implication is: Kim and her family are bringing you down. Jay Z and Beyoncé didn’t show up at your wedding because of them. That kind of thing:
All that, I wouldn’t even speak on. 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.
On their wedding photo receiving millions of likes on the gram:
Don’t say you don’t know! It’s because of Kim. Meaning there’s no photo that I would have put up by myself, or next to one of my smarty friends, that would have got that amount of likes. So now you take this photo that has that amount of likes, and it has a flower wall from the same guy who does the Lanvin shows, and it has a couture Givenchy dress and Givenchy tuxedo in it. That’s the point. Now the thing that is the most popular is also communicating the highest level of creativity. The concept of Kimye has more cultural significance than what Page Six could write.
Why’d you decide to get married?:
Saying “Hey, I like Kim” isn’t as inspiring to people as us getting married. And anyone that’s in a relationship knows that in order to get to the point to get married and then to be married and to then carry on, it needs that work put into it. Right now, people look at it and it’s like, “Wow, that’s inspiring.” Meaning that love is infectious. You know, God is infectious—God flowing through us and us being little-baby creators and shit. But His energy and His love and what He wants us to have as people and the way He wants us to love each other, that is infectious. Like they said in Step Brothers: Never lose your dinosaur. This is the ultimate example of a person never losing his dinosaur. Meaning that even as I grew in cultural awareness and respect and was put higher in the class system in some way for being this musician, I never lost my dinosaur.
Kim is this girl who fucking turns me on. I love her. This is who I want to be next to and be around. And then people would try to say, “Well, you know, if you’re a musician, you should be with a musician, and if you want to design, you need to be with a girl from the design world.” I don’t give a fuck about people’s opinions. Because when a kid falls in love with an airplane or a bike or a dinosaur—especially if you’re an only child and it’s not because of the book that the sibling was reading—it’s like, fuck, you mean to tell me that the dinosaurs walked the earth and stuff like that?! That’s amazing! You mean to tell me that these giant multi-ton crafts can fly that fast and that loud, and they can flip, and there’s danger, the possibility of them exploding? That’s fucking cool! You mean to tell me that this girl with this fucking body and this face is also into style, and she’s a nice person, and she has her own money and is family-oriented? That’s just as cool as a fucking fighter jet or dinosaur! And just as rarely seen.
That’s a lovely way of putting it:
I feel like you’re stronger as a team. Because when you know you have a team player, it’s not one on the world anymore. At least it’s two on the world.
How do you feel about Yeezus now, a year later?:
I think Yeezus is the beginning of a completely new era of music. 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.
What about “New Slaves“? Do you think people would react differently to that song if it came out now?:
It’s funny, because when the Clippers situation happened, people started bringing up that song again. Sometimes you do things in the same way that a designer might throw out a new cut or a rapper might throw out a new concept, and people might not be into it at that time. If “New Slaves” had come out right after the Clippers incident, it would have seemed more timely. So the thirty meetings that I was having where I was going through a lot of these “Stay in your place” type conversations—”Stay in your box, this is what you do, you can’t do anything else”—that led me to the point of creating “New Slaves” and “Blood on the Leaves” and the entire Yeezus album, and to make the album basically like a protest in music, where it only has like four melodies on it—you know, other people weren’t in that place. Obviously certain things are more digestible for mass consumption. But it was interesting. That song that I do feel is the best rap verse of all
time—
Yeezus seemed to be a moment when you maybe let go of wanting a Grammy. You let go of wanting record sales, in a way that seemed uncharacteristic for you:
When I was sitting and trying to do a collaboration with the Gap, in the meeting, when they’re like, “No, because you’re a celebrity, and you have a bad reputation, and you don’t know anything about clothing, so we don’t want to do this”—in that meeting, there’s no extra single that I could have done that could have got me that deal. There’s no extra Grammy that I could have won that could have made it more real. And that’s the reason why I had to express the way I feel. Which all rhymed just right there. But Yeezus was extremely purposeful. 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.
But it’s such a delicate dance, right? At a certain point, maybe you have to go back and you have to sell some records, win some awards, to maintain your spot in music:
Man, it’s crazy. And having to take all of your energy, or a lot more of your energy, to focus on fashion. And while you’re focusing on that, such-and-such just keeps coming for the spot.
And I might complain about how hard it is in clothing, but also I think it’s great that it’s so hard. Because the barrier to entry is really, really, really, really high. And I’m literally trying to do—back when I did Watch the Throne, and the fashion, I think it was just too much for people. It was just too crazy. It was just too crazy to do Watch the Throne, “Niggas in Paris,” shoot a surround-vision film in Qatar, show the film in Cannes…
Put a kilt on…
Yeah, kilt. Then do two fashion shows with Jourdan Dunn, Joan Smalls, Irina Shayk, have Diddy, Anna Wintour, Riccardo, Kim at the show, and drop the Yeezys? It felt like every single industry that I was trying to tap into looked at every other industry and everyone held hands. It was like, “Fuck that. No. This is just too crazy.”
So what’s the lesson you take away from that?:
History’s gonna be harder to make than I thought.
On falling back from Twitter because of Kim:
Both me and Kim had to learn how to communicate as a team. These are two LeBrons, you know? Meaning she could do shit that a girlfriend in a relationship could never do. Obviously. And I could do stuff that a guy in a relationship could never do. So if you look at half my tweets back then, they were always, like, funny tweets that I wouldn’t be able to say now. It wouldn’t be respectful to my relationship. It’s interesting, as I’m delving into being married: Like, what is my verbal creative communication? That’s another thing I really like about clothing and film—you could still communicate with a film, because it’s not you. But when you’re a reality star or a rapper, you are the film.
But now, for the new album, one new thing could change everything. 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.”
I feel like people have no idea if you’re ever actually happy, or what makes you happy:
Well, when I work on an album, it’s fun at certain times. There’s some accomplishments, and sometimes there’s a bit of frustration. And it’s usually like a nine-month process, right? This is a multi-lifetime process that we have now embarked on. Meaning starting now, you’re just starting to see a glimmer of what the idea of West will mean. So right now, at this age and with this visibility and with the skill sets that Kim is now giving me, I think I have a good chance of success in building something that has longevity, high integrity, high success rate, and is very fulfilling, not only for me creatively but also in adding fulfillment to people’s lives. Adding ease. Adding wonder. Adding magic.
But does happiness arrive at the end of that rainbow? I think people genuinely wonder that:
Well, you build your happy wife, happy life, happy home, all this stuff, right? Everybody that’s in a relationship that has ever worked on a home knows one of the most frustrating processes is actually working on the home. So when people would see me last year, two years ago, unhappy, I was in the process of building the home.
But what makes me happy is land, and we’re on a boat now. This is Christopher Columbus. This is uncharted waters we’re on. We’d be super happy to be on land, and also a little bit like, “Ah, the journey’s over!” But I feel like, we got the Vogue cover, Steve McQueen won the Oscar, we finally got married… You know? We have a child. We’re a family now. I am an arbiter of taste, and people think that I have the ability to make things cool—or if I’m doing it, it should be cool. And I feel that this stuff’s starting to be cool. And that feels good to me. Because I don’t like walking around with people thinking I’m doing uncool shit, because there’s nothing I’m doing that’s uncool. It’s all innovative. You just might not understand it yet. But it’s cool. Family is super cool. Going home to one girl every night is super cool. Just going home and getting on the floor and playing with your child is super cool. Not wearing a red leather jacket, and just looking like a dad and shit, is like super cool. Having someone that I can call Mom again. That shit is super cool.
Via GQ
Yassss!
