Kanye West covers the April 2015 issue of PAPER magazine after his wife Kim Kardashian's nude cover last year.
Yeezy pens an essay on his vision of the 'American dream' or 'World dream' as he calls it.
Kanye addresses his thoughts on race, inequality, altruism, beauty, fashion, music creation, innovation, illuminati, among other topics....
Other artists:
“I think it’s so important for me, as an artist, to give Drake as much information as I can, A$AP, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, any of these younger artists as much information as I can to make better music in the future. We should all be trying to make something that’s better.” It's funny that I worked at the Gap in high school, because in my past 15 years it seems like that's the place I stood in my creative path -- to be the gap, the bridge"
On fashion:
“And when you sit down with Riccardo Tisci at the Louvre and he pitches the idea of you wearing a leather kilt, which could be considered by all of your gangbanging friends as some sort of a dress or skirt, at that point you are now a part of the fashion world. You have paid your dues to be an insider. I paid my dues when I had to wear a kilt in Chicago, and friends would say, ‘What’s your boy got on?’ But there are warriors that have killed people in kilts in the past. Who gets to decide what’s hard and what’s not hard? When I saw this kilt, I liked it. I was into it. It looked fresh to me. I felt creative; I didn't feel limited by some perception.”
On illuminati membership:
“I heard a comment—a joke—about the TIDAL press conference being an Illuminati moment. If there was actually an Illuminati, it would be more like the energy companies. Not celebrities that gave their life to music and who are pinpointed as decoys for people who really run the world. I’m tired of people pinpointing musicians as the Illuminati. That’s ridiculous. We don’t run anything; we’re celebrities. We’re the face of brands. We have to compromise what we say in lyrics so we don’t lose money on a contract. Madonna is in her 50s and gave everything she had to go up on an award show and get choked by her cape. She’s judged for who she adopts. Fuck all of this sensationalism. We gave you our lives. We gave you our hearts. We gave you our opinions!”
On racism:
On 'Never Let Me Down' I rapped, 'Racism's still alive, they just be concealing it,' but for the next generation that's not necessarily true. Racism is something that's taught, but for the new post-Internet, post-iPad kids that have been taught to swipe before they read, it's just not going to affect them as much. They realize that we are one race. We're different colors -- my cousins and I are different shapes and we're all from one family. We're all from one family called the human race. It's simple as that. This race is up against some interesting things -- poverty, war, global warming, classism -- and we have to come together to beat this. It'll only be as a collective that we can beat this, and we can. We can create a better world for ourselves."
Experience on racism:
“When I was 10 years old I lived in China, and at the time they used to come up to me and rub my face to see if the color would rub off. It was really fucked up, but I feel like it was preparing me for a world perspective that a lot of my friends who never got a chance to travel didn’t get. Now my perspective, a lot of times, is so much wider than someone who’s limited to the concept of any particular so-called world that’s not the real world.”
On being remembered:
"It's fine to not get credit for everything; it's almost better. For the amount of things that I really want to do, it can only work if I'm credited for about 20 percent of them. Because if I'm really credited for the amount of things that I'm going to do and what I want to do, it's just too much. The reward is in the deed itself. “The times that I’ve looked like a crazy person—when I was screaming at an interviewer or screaming from the stage—all I was screaming was, ‘Help me to help more! I’ve given all I’ve got. I’ve gone into fucking debt. It’s all I’ve got to give. But if I had a little bit more opportunity, I could give so much more.’ That’s what I was screaming for. Help me to help more.”
Read the full essay at papermag.com.
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