Here's Kanye's GQ cover page story...Some of you
may enjoy it! Find below...
Kanye West has been married for ten days, and he
has that new-husband way with the ring still,
pulling it on and off like it's something he might
yet undo, or do again. The ring is gold, and
understated in a way that not much else about
Kanye West is. He sits in the lobby of New York's
Mercer Hotel—the same hotel where he and Jay Z
recorded most of Watch the Throne—reflecting on
the distance he's come. "I am a black American
male from Chicago," West says, "who had my
rehearsal dinner at Versailles and then got
married in Florence with a view of the entire city."
Continue...
He is one year removed from Yeezus, the record that
took all of West's prodigious pop gifts and made a
show of immolating them one by one. He is one year
removed from telling anyone who'd listen that he
was going to burn the entire fashion industry down,
or at least he would once they let him through the
door. Now they kind of have: He's got a capsule
collection with A.P.C. out now; a line with Adidas that
debuts with footwear this fall; and somewhere off in
the distance, a new menswear line. He's also got a
new record—maybe even a full-on pop record, though
he hasn't decided yet. He knows he is no longer the
most popular man in rap. "Currently that spot is
taken," West says. "Let's be honest—he got last
summer."
Who?
"You know. There's only one person."
Drake?
"Yeah. He got last summer. And I'd never given it up
till last summer." Now he's thinking about taking it
back. "It's a real question for me. Do I want to?"
Meanwhile, he's reckoning with what it is to be a
father and a husband and a decent human. He's
happier now—"You see I haven't name-dropped and
said a bunch of negative stuff about people," he says
at one point—but no less homicidally competitive or
less convinced that he's the next Steve Jobs. He'd
like to spend more time with his family. He'd also still
like to build amusement parks. It's a contradiction,
one he's only begun to resolve. And all the while, he
can't go outside with his wife, Kim Kardashian,
without having his photo taken. His entire waking life
has become a performance, a manifesto, a fashion
shoot.
Most of the time, he's cool with that fact. But not
always. "I hope we don't see no paparazzi today,"
West says. "Because I'm still getting acquainted with
these jogging pants I threw on. Like, 'That's not my
statement!' "
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.
Can I read you something? The New York
Post's Page Six has an account of your wedding
that reads, in part: "Kanye returned one hour
before the wedding and didn't like the all-
white bar that was in front of the Gold Toilet
Tower. He took a saw and started sawing it in
half himself. Two men held the bar stable as
he sawed, and sawed, into the bar, defacing
the entire front, screaming at everyone around
him. He said it looked like a bar from Texas.
Then he ordered two pieces of raw wood to be
nailed onto the front of the bar. Once the wood
was in place, 'Now,' he said, 'it's art.' The
Italian construction teams looked at this guy
and couldn't believe what they were seeing."
For the person that wrote that, were they involved
with anything last year that was as culturally
significant as the Yeezus tour or that album? They
didn't even talk there about the photographs, or the
dress, or Andrea Bocelli singing, or the marble tables.
They're like: "It's a gold toilet." No. The bathrooms—
that usually would be a porta-potty—were wrapped
in a fabric that was neutral to match the fort. The bar
was terrible, and the wedding planner didn't approve
it with me. I was having issues with this wedding
planner the entire time on approvals, and I get there
and they threw some weird plastic bar there. So the
same materials that were used to cover the
bathroom, we said, "Let's just use that, because this
is all we have to make the bar look better." Which it
did, in the end. And anyone knows that you cannot
pick up tools yourself, because of—what are those
rules about the workers?
Unions?
Yeah, unions. You can't do that. It's illegal. That's
false.
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.
How does it feel when you read something like
that account of your wedding or you see a
photo of you looking glum at a zipline go viral?
My feelings don't matter anymore.
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."