GETTING BACK INTO HIS SUPERPOWER: CONFIDENCE
The enigmatic rapper talks politics, the TMZ interview, family and new album, Ye
JACKSON, WYO.— One afternoon early last year, Kanye West walked into the living room of his California home and found Tony Robbins — the Hulk-sized, concrete-grinned motivational speaker — waiting for him.
It had been just a few months since the rapper, producer, fashion designer and cultural fire starter had gone through one of the most taxing periods of his public life: His wife was robbed at gunpoint and a series of erratic concert appearances followed, culminating in a nineday stint in the UCLA Medical Centre. He was in a state of shambles, and it showed.
“He could look at me and you know, I don’t know why he mentioned suicide, but he could tell that I was very low,” West recalled in early June over breakfast at the rustic modernist home here that he’s been renting and making music in. “Really medicated, shoulders slumped down and my confidence was gone, which is a lot of the root of my superpower, because if you truly have selfconfidence no one can say anything to you.”
Robbins, who is known for his boisterous seminars that feature hot-coal walking, had been summoned by West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, to stage something like an intervention.
And so Robbins looked Kanye West in the eyes and started issuing instructions. Made him stand up, get into a warrior pose and scream.
“I was so self-conscious about the nanny and the housekeeper that I didn’t want them to hear me screaming in the living room,” West said. “I think that that’s such a metaphor of something for the existence of socalled well-off people that they’re not really well off — they won’t even scream in their own house.”
He was reluctant. But he screamed.
The fix wasn’t instantaneous. “I still felt self-conscious,” West said. “I didn’t have my confidence back.” But it was a start.
West’s last two years have included wild stretches of chaos, public trauma, divisive flirtations with partisan politics, and health struggles that played out both in public and in private. Depending on the moment, he has been the subject of empathy, enthusiasm or scorn. For many, his embrace of U.S. President Donald Trump and his controversial conversation about slavery with TMZ in May have been too toxic.
Certainly, casual dismissal of West has always been a built-in feature of his fame, but in terms of public perception, it’s possible he’s never been more radioactive. The world is now more skeptical and less patient.
But over two days of extended interviews — edited excerpts from which are included below — Kanye was calm, measured, verging on beatific and also self-aware and willing to reckon with the challenges he had created for himself.
Over the past few weeks, he has worked on the release of five albums: his eighth LP, Ye, and his collaboration with Kid Cudi, Kids See Ghosts, as well as records by Pusha-T, Nas and Teyana Taylor that he produced.
Much of that music was made here. He’s been coming to this area regularly since early 2017, a couple of months after his hospital stay. “We came here just for healing,” he said earlier in the day. “Getting my brain together and (expletive).” He was medicated then — he had recently received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder — but over time, he began “learning how to not be on meds,” adding proudly, “I took one pill in the last seven days.”
The night before, he had hosted a listening party for Ye, flying in hundreds of fellow artists, coastal cool kids and representatives of the press, radio and streaming services to eat barbecue and dance around a bonfire. After everyone who had been imported for the affair was exported back home — “We turned jumbo jets to Uber,” he said, grinning — West was taking a slow Friday.
The Wyoming listening session was up there with the golden-era Kanye West exploits: an absurdist stunt, an immense display of ego and a genuinely new contribution to the rich history of hip-hop excess.
If it was baptismal, it felt doubly so given the few weeks that preceded it. Beginning in midApril, West returned to Twitter with gale force, posting a torrent of old photos, self-help speak, cult-leader aphorisms, clothing-line updates and, most disruptive, continued amplification of conservative voices and doubled-down support for Trump, citing their shared “dragon energy.”
“There were people who said Trump would never win,” West said. “I’m talking about the it-will-never-happens of the world, people in high school told you things would never happen.”
To his mind, he was supporting a friend and kindred spirit, and also speaking up in a way others wouldn’t — as is his wont, generally.
“I felt that I knew people who voted for Trump that were celebrities that were scared to say that they liked him. But they told me, and I liked him, and I’m not scared to say what I like,” he said. “Let me come over here and get in this fight with you.”
Is there anything a person could do that is so beyond the pale that you wouldn’t support them, even if you liked them?
I wanted to make my album cover the doctor that performed my mom’s last surgery. I think that’s pretty big on the cancelculture territory. I’m starting saying, “I’m not cancelling him,” ’cause the world cancelled him. I believe in the court of public opinion that that thought has to change.
Do you feel there is an expectation of you — because you’re a successful Black man in this country — to take on certain political or cultural positions?
Oh yeah, definitely. When I was in high school, most of my opinions were only me and a couple people who thought like me.
But now you feel the pressure to speak for a whole group of people?
Nah. It’s a rhetorical dumbass question — you could just say yes — but do you think there are a lot of husband-and-wife situations where the husband in the household liked Trump and voted on Trump and maybe the wife didn’t, or vice versa?
Of course.
Man, I had my (expletives) castrated: “You have to like Hillary. That’s got to be your choice.”
That’s what the family was telling you?
The family meaning the world — because you’re Black, because you make very sensitive music, because you’re a very sensitive soul, it was like an arranged marriage or something. And I’m like, that’s not who I want to marry. I don’t feel that. I believe that I’m actually a better father because I got my (expletive) voice back, I’m a better artist because I got my voice back. I was living inside of some universe that was created by the mob-thought and I had lost who I was, so that’s when I was in the sunken place.
When did that change happen?
Getting out, learning how to not be highly medicated and, you know, just standing up saying I know I could lose a lot of things, but just standing up and saying what you feel, and not even doing a lot of research on it. Having a political opinion that’s overly informed, it’s like knowing how to dress, as opposed to being a child — “I like this.” I hear Trump talk and I’m like, I like the way it sounds, knowing that there’s people who like me that don’t like the way it sounds.
But if he says something like he doesn’t want to let Muslims into the country, do you like the way that sounds?
No, I don’t agree with all of his policies. ★★★★★ Ordinarily, public figures see microphones as natural enemies, designed to undo them. But this is not how West treats them. He speaks in long, jagged discussions, moving fluidly between subjects — saying he wished Bernie Sanders could have been Trump’s vice-president one moment, lamenting the awkwardness of a lyric about Tristan Thompson (the father of Khloé Kardashian’s daughter) the next.
This is, generally speaking, an approach incompatible with a media environment that ruthlessly records, dissects and parses each moment, examining it hard for flaws.
That hasn’t changed West’s methodology, though. Not long after his April Trump tweetstorm, West posted a long-form video interview on his website with the acidic New York radio host Charlamagne Tha God. The setup was tasteful, all neutral tones. It showed West at his most lucid and sharp, and suggested that perhaps smoother waters were ahead.
The West who appeared on TMZ’s daily TV show is much more familiar: loose-tongued, provocative, searching. There was also a vulnerability that was easy to overlook, as when he admitted to having had liposuction. But most crucially, and most alarmingly, he said that 400 years of slavery “sound like a choice.”
To West’s mind, what happened on TMZ was a failure of language, not ideas. “I said the idea of sitting in something for 400 years sounds — sounds — like a choice to me, I never said it’s a choice. I never said slavery itself — like being shackled in chains — was a choice,” he said. “That’s why I went from slave, to 400 years, to mental prison, to this and that. If you look at the clip you see the way my mind works.”
The TMZ appearance essentially squandered all of the public goodwill West had accumulated earlier in the day — except in the view of West, who naturally saw the two media appearances as part of the same continuum.
“I think it was totally beautiful, both of them,” he said. “The Charlamagne one was like the most beautiful funeral you’ve ever been to, and you close the casket and say this is done.”
And the TMZ one?
And the TMZ one was the (expletive), the casket like (makes opening motion and screams) and the people in church is like (mimes shock and horror and shrieks) “Slave?!” Ahhh! Ahhh!
To clarify, do you believe that slavery was a choice?
Well, I never said that.
If you could say it again, how would you frame it?
I wouldn’t frame a one-liner or a headline. What I would say is actually it’s literally like I feel like I’m in court having to justify a robbery that I didn’t actually commit, where I’m having to somehow reframe something that reframe said. I feel stupid to have to say out loud that I know that being put on the boat was — but also I’m not backing down, bro.
Do you feel that if Black fans abandon you, that’s something that you could come back from?
It’s not going to happen. ★★★★★
Ye is an album of deep vulnerability, West’s rawest since
808s & Heartbreak. It reckons with the internal chemistry that causes mental illness and with the real-life consequences of his public behaviour. Perhaps it is not surprising to learn that eight days before its release, West said, he had had none of the lyrics of Ye written. And he still went to see Deadpool 2. Twice.
Perhaps the most consequential lyrics of this West era are about mental health.
On “I Thought About Killing You,” to what degree is that literal and to what degree is that metaphor?
Oh yeah, I’ve thought about killing myself all the time. It’s always an option and (expletive). Like Louis C.K. said: I flip through the manual. I weigh all the options.
I’m just having this epiphany now, ’cause I didn’t do it, but I did think it all the way through. But if I didn’t think it all the way through, then it’s actually maybe more of a chance of it happening. ★★★★★ One of the most affecting songs on Ye is “Wouldn’t Leave,” in which West suggests that his TMZ appearance put his marriage at risk.
“There was a moment where I felt like after TMZ, maybe a week after that, I felt like the energy levels were low, and I called different family members and was asking, you know, ‘Was Kim thinking about leaving me after TMZ?’ ” he said. “So that was a real conversation.”
And yet Ye still debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart. That underscores the real tension endemic to contemporary cancel culture: It’s possible to be cancelled and thrive at the same time.