“I Put the Bed Together Myself”: Kanye West and Modern Design on the 10th Anniversary of The College Dropout

"We can collectively affect the world through design." -Kanye West, January 2012

On the rambling final track of Kanye West's turning-ten-this-week The College Dropout, "Last Call," Kanye's delivers a one-man oral history of his own mythological creation. He describes getting evicted and moving to New Jersey: "I hadn't even seen my apartment. I remember we pulled up, I unpacked all my shit. You know, we went to Ikea, I bought a bed. I put the bed together myself." That detail doesn't come off as another typical rapper you-don't-know-what-its-like-in-the-real-shit backdoor brag. It's a truly humble statement of I'm-a-real-human-being-goddammit that fits Kanye's persona at the time. The audio of his mother (who passed away three years after the album released) over those lines, "Kanye, baby, we're here," still makes me want to cry every time I hear it.

I don't believe there is such a thing as an actual universal experience, but having to put together an Ikea bed gets pretty damn close. I bet Kanye and his mother snapped at each other trying to find the right pieces in those jangly bags of screws that are all just slightly and excruciatingly different from one other. I bet someone's fingers got pinched trying to make all the pieces fit together right. I bet there was at least some version of the phrase, "If you're just going to tell me how to do it, why don't you do it yourself?" thrown around. And I bet a pretty high percentage of people reading this right now are thinking of their own frustrating experiences with Ikea furniture. But seriously, how good does it feel after the blood, sweat and tears to sit on or even just look at something you put together yourself?

And isn't that what the whole outro of "Last Call" is about? Isn't that what College Dropout celebrates? Making it on your own terms? I don't think it's a coincidence that Kanye included that Ikea anecdote on a track that also recalls meeting Jay-Z and getting signed to Roc-A-Fella Records. They are in their own way, equally important moments. Kanye's Ikea moment is proof that he cares about even the smallest details. Not only the way things look, but what they signify and represent.

We learn from "Last Call" that Kanye and his mother left Chicago because of a forced eviction. However, he still decided to buy a new bed once he got to New Jersey. Even with the tightest of budgets, the clean modern lines of an Ikea bed beckoned to him. While the Kanye West of 2004 may seem like a totally different Kanye from the one we know now in 2014, something as simple as an Ikea bed is evidence that he's always been thoughtful about aesthetics and design.

The 2010 short film Runaway revived ideas about Kanye and design that began spinning in my mind from when I first tried to parse where Ikea falls in the world of Kanye West. Roughly six minutes into the movie, we witness Kanye toying with an MPC 2000 XL, messing with the beat for the first single off My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, "Power." His tapping fingers tease the hook while his Phoenix/girlfriend twitches and gyrates in a hypnotic trance. She rises off a sofa opposite of the table where Kanye is splitting his focus between her exhibition and his work at hand. While that simple description begins to convey the charged nature of the scene, the stylistic choices in the pieces of furniture selected bring it to a whole other level.

The pieces in the room that belong to Kanye and the Phoenix are fine examples of 18th-century French design. The low seated sette where the Phoenix perches and Kanye's work table are both highly decorated with sweeping Rococo curves and elaborate carving, topped off with shimmering gold guilding and the sette's delicate floral upholstery. The sensuality of these pieces heighten the intimacy of the otherwise Mies-ian sparseness of the room, composed of gray brick, neutral curtain, wood and glass. The same fluid Rococo curves and delicate detailing are seen boldly framing the cover of College Dropout, maintaining the same choice of contrasting elaborate decoration and visual brevity. This opulent and erotic moment from Runaway is thus captured by calling attention to the intimate space created by these pieces. This is the same way that lighter and sweeter designs of Rococo furniture changed the nature of the French court during the 18th century as design moved away from the previous Baroque bulkiness.This type of close reading of the visual set reveals that this staging was no accident. Mr. West certainly knows his way around letting furniture speak to his larger purpose. And he has come a long way from buying an Ikea bed with his mom.

In the same year, Kanye made a furniture-centric cameo in the video for Duck Sauce's "Barbara Streisand." He appears for a few brief moments sitting in a modern remake of the dec arts classic, Alessandro Mendini's "Proust" chair. With the swirling frame and ballooning upholstery of a Baroque-style armchair, it's entirely covered in Pop Art inspired fields of flat, bright color. The original chair, which differs from this one mostly by its surface decoration (which instead of a Pop Art inspired paint job was covered all over in a bright haze of Pointillism) was a key piece in the dialogue about Postmodern design in the seventies. The juxtaposition of styles and decoration was meant to raise questions about the purpose of design. This striking combination of color and form might just look like a funky chair to some, but Mendini meant to visually call to question such important topics as tradition, function, and decoration in art. These conflicts are still at the core of most arguments about design, and Kanye deserves a seat at the head of this discussion. After all, isn't the reworking and investigation into forms and content the same thing Kanye has been doing with rap music since College Dropout?

And don't forget Kanye's 2012 DONDA tweet-ifesto, further proof that he's been seriously thinking about issues in design. Here are a few select quotes from that Twitter bombardment: "DONDA will be comprised of over 22 divisions with a goal to make products and experiences that people want and can afford. We want to help simplify and aesthetically improve everything we see, hear, touch, taste and feel. … To dream of, create, advertise and produce products driven equally by emotional want and utilitarian need. To marry our wants and needs."

The harmonious marriage of want and need is the postmodern struggle. It's what Mendini was thinking about, it's what the Bauhaus was thinking about, and it's the struggle Kanye West has been documenting since The College Dropout.

Karen Peltier has an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts from the Smithsonian Associates and the Corcoran College of Art + Design. She's got a lot of feelings about furniture and is on Twitter - @dudebutt