Kanye West: We the real rockstars and I'm the biggest of all of them. I'm the biggest rock star on the planet.
Zane Lowe: There it is. That record- it says that. That's what your album says when you come out, and there are songs on there where you make it very clear.
KW: So what I want to explain to everybody out there, it's like, I make music I can do it, but I shouldn't be limited to only one place of creativity. And it's literally only like one of two reason why I haven't been able to break that down.
ZL: But why should you feel that you are? Because-
KW: No! This is the thing you guys don't understand. You guys don't understand. You guys don't understand that I did the Yeezys and they EBAY'd for 90 thousand dollars and people wanted them bad as whatever, right? But I didn't get a call from Nike the next day. You guys don't understand that I've met with companies and they say, "What we're trying to figure out is how we can control you and control that". If you're an architect and you're a world builder and you have all these ideas and you're Gaudi, and you want to build buildings, if you don't ever get that out, what's gonna happen?
ZL: Isn't that why you do it? Isn't it the process? Isn't it point to do it?
KW: I don't think you're really hearing what I'm saying.
ZL: I'm trying to
KW: As a creative, for you to have done something to the level of the Yeezys and not be able to create more and you cannot- you cannot create that on your own, with no support, with no backing. So when I say " clean water was only served to the fairer skinned" what I'm saying is we're making products with chitlins. T-SHIRTS! That's the most we can make! T-shirts. We could have our best perspective on t-shirts. But if it's anything else...
*HAND SMACK*
your Truman Show boat is hitting the wall. And what's more important to me about this than everything I can do sonically and everything is, if I go somewhere else and someone says, "Hey, we don't like Kanye West" you've heard that before, right? What people don't realize is I want to make uniforms for my high school basketball team through Brand Yeezy. I want to make that one step, and then make another step, and eventually do uniforms for the entire city, then I want those uniforms to be hot and make money, then I eventually want to be the anchor and the force behind a billion dollar company and after I make that billion dollar step, then I can go in and say I have an opinion on this and that could be a ten billion dollar step, I eventually want to be the anchor of the first trillion dollar company. But when you sit and you have a meeting with a company and show them the most innovate take on theatre because you thought of it one night when you were sitting on top of Watch The Throne set which you designed with Es Devlin, and I designed the set with Es Devlin and thought of, "Ok, surround vision, there should be a screen above you, below you, to the left, to the right of you and one in front of you also" then I paid my own money that I get paid for doing Gold Digger, which I never really liked that song but I always knew I would get paid for doing Gold Digger, then I shoot a film in Qatar with three camera crews, with Nate Brown, Virgil, Matt Williams, Nabil, all of these crew- all of the people that every video that pops up every other day on Hypebeast thats my crew, right? So, we go out and shoot that, 3 camera crews over 5 days edited over 30 days, show it at amfAR- no, show it in Cannes, the night before amfAR on the beach, build it in a pyramid with Rem Koolhaas' agency, design the entire thing, put editors in it, blah blah blah, people give a standing ovation, I do an interview in New York Times the next year to say, "Hey, I did this and I want to let you know I did it", right? And then, it doesn't get mentioned in the interview and a week later they do an interview with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they're talking about what the next frontier of theatre will be and how it'll be higher priced tickets and it'll be something that's surrounding you and blah blah blah, maybe it's in the goggles, I said, "Wait a second, I just only did the interview to tell people that I invented it. I made it."
Like I went, I remember when I was, uh, dropping William Morris, right, and then Sarah Newkirk at that time said "Before you drop them, go meet with Ari Emanuel" and I sat with him and I said, "Ari, I'm an inventor" and he goes on to tell me about the way it works and what he said was "You are a celebrity. So basically what's going to happen is, there's product here, and this is where you end up, right here. If you can communicate the product you can make money of the product, cause look at Gaga. She's the Creative Director of Polaroid." I like some the Gaga songs. What the f** does she know about cameras? So it becomes all of this thing where all of the musicians- the musicians try to get more money by promoting other products, right? So you'll say "Hey, you know what? I've got this water and we've got, you know, we've got this red version. We got a red bottle, and we've got a David Beckham version here, then we got a blue version." So my opinion is no more than the patina on top of it, when I understand the reason from my core of why something should work all the way through. So, I understand we want to make it about music but I wanted to take this step to say, we got this new thing called " Cla**ism". It's racism's cousin. This is what we do to hold people back. This is what we do. And we got this other thing we got that has been working for a long time where you don't have to be racist anymore it's called "Self-Hate"; it works on itself. It's like real estate of racism. Where, just like that, when someone comes up and says something like "I am a god", everybody says "Who does he think he is?" I just told you who I thought I am, a god! I just told you! That's who I think I am! Would it have been better if I had a song that said, "I am a n***a"? or if I had song that said "I am a gangsta"? or if I had song that said "I am a pimp"? All those color and patinas fit better on a person like me, right? But to say you are a god? Especially, when you got shipped over to the country that you're in, and your last name is a slave owners. How can you say that; how could you have that mentality?
ZL: I mean, I know in the past you've talked about, like, you know, building hotels, doing things beyond people's normal frame of reference. They know you as Kanye West, an artist. They know you're moving into fashion, but these things in a way I guess are hard on people to comprehend because they don't have that level of drive. Do you know what I mean? Has it always been like this for you? Have you always felt like you can set your mind on anything and you will achieve it, ultimately?
KW: I've always felt I can do anything. That's the main thing people are controlled by, thoughts- the perceptions of themselves. They're slowed down by the perception of themselves. If you're taught you can't do anything you won't do anything. I was taught I could do everything and I'm Kanye West at age 36. So just watch the next ten years.
ZL: Yea yea yea.