Into the wild with Kanye West
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 nine-day stint in the UCLA Medical Center. 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 self-confidence, 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.
“We need to be able to be in situations where you can be irresponsible. That’s one of the great privileges of an artist. An artist should be irresponsible in a way — a 3-year-old.”
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 President Donald Trump and his controversial conversation about slavery with TMZ in May have been too toxic.
Certainly, casual dismissal of West always has 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. Over the past decade and a half, objection has tended to roll off him; now it’s sticking.
But over two days of extended interviews that took place in his rented Amangani Resort home, on long walks through Jackson, and in lengthy car rides spanning eastern Idaho to Yellowstone National Park, Kanye was calm, measured, verging on beatific and also self-aware and willing to reckon with the challenges he’d 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.” He was medicated then — he’d 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’d hosted a listening party for “Ye,” flying in hundreds of fellow artists and coastal cool kids to eat barbecue and dance around a bonfire.
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 mid-April, West returned to Twitter with gale force, posting a torrent of old photos, selfhelp-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.
“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.”
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 discursions, 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 Khloe Kardashian’s daughter) the next. He is in a constant state of self-revision. More than any other famous person of his stature, he shares his rough drafts.
This is, generally speaking, an approach incompatible with a media environment that ruthlessly records, dissects and parses each moment, examining it hard for flaws.
The West who appeared on TMZ’s daily TV show is much more familiar: loose-tongued, provocative, searching. There also was a vulnerability that was easy to overlook, as when he admitted to having had liposuction. (By way of elaboration about the procedure, he said, “As holy as I am and all that (expletive), I still do some rich (expletive phrase) sometimes.”)
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.”
He continued, delineating the path of many a Kanye West public conflagration. “I think an extreme thing; I adjust it, I adjust it, I adjust it,” he explained. “That’s the way I get to it, but I have to push to, you know, the furthest concept possible.”
Q: How does it make you feel when you know an experiment didn’t work?
A: Awesome. I learned so much. I learned about the context of the idea of the word slave. I didn’t take it in that context. I think that my personality and energy mirrors Nat Turner, or it had in the past, but that showed me that also that Nat Turner approach would land me in the same place Nat Turner landed and that I would be legendary but also just a martyr. But I guess we’re all martyrs eventually and we’re all guaranteed to die.
Q: To clarify, do you believe that slavery in this country was a choice?
A: Well, I never said that.
Q: If you could say it again how would you frame it?
A: I wouldn’t frame a oneliner 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 I never 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. What I will do is I’ll take responsibility for the fact that I allowed my voice to be used back to back in ways that were not protective of it when my voice means too much.
Q: Back to back?
A: Wearing the Trump hat, because my voice is unprotected and I believe that the black community wants to protect my voice. By me saying slave in any way at TMZ left my voice unprotected. So it’s not a matter of the facts of if I said that exact line or not, it’s the fact that I put myself in a position to be unprotected by my tribe.
Q: Do you feel that if black fans abandon you, that’s something that you could come back from? Do you think that is a death blow?
A: It’s not going to happen.
Q: On “I Thought About Killing You,” to what degree is that literal and to what degree is that metaphor?
A: Oh yeah, I’ve thought about killing myself all the time. It’s always a option and (expletive). Like Louis C.K. said: I flip through the manual. I weigh all the options.
If there has been a corrective force during this tumultuous period, it’s been Kim, whom West married in 2014. They now have three children: 5-year-old North; 2-year-old Saint; and 5-month-old Chicago. Their lives and businesses are symbiotic. She flew to Wyoming to celebrate at the ranch with West and over the next two days, they checked in regularly by phone. At one point, she sent him a video of North singing the chorus of “No Mistakes” and he watched it dozens of times, ignoring everyone in the room.
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.
Like many of the songs on “Ye,” this one functions as both personal and professional, micro and macro, individual and universal. West is serenading not just his wife, but also the fans who stuck by him during this most trying period.
Or as he put it on “No Mistakes,” “For all my dogs that stayed down, we up again.”