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One Week On: Six Things From The Kanye interview We Still Need To Talk About

On the first listen it sounded like the ramblings of egocentric mad man, but it turns out Kanye has given us a lot to discuss.

The first time you listened to Yeezus, it doesn’t really make sense, the beats are sporadic, and the standout lyrics are funny but crass. "Sweet and sour sauce"? Bit racist bro. But on each listen, you start to get your head around it, punchlines and wordplay take you by surprise. The patchwork production, where no loop is allowed to rest, constantly being interrupted by a new sample or screech or distortion is constantly exciting, and then you just want to listen to it over and over again. After a week, you hear there are big ideas in there that need to be discussed.

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It’s the same with Kanye’s interview from Monday night with BBC Radio 1. On the first listen it sounded like the ramblings of egocentric mad man, but as you unpacked what he was saying, you realise there was so much to talk about. There have been some great pieces on the interview (and what other artist can give one outlet an interview and then get a piece in every media publication in the world analysing how it went) from The Guardian's Dorian Lynskey who thought it made him sound like a prick and our own Ryan Bassil who thought it proved he was genius.

But one week on, there are still things we need to talk about from the Kanye interview. Here are six of them.

HE OPENED UP A DEBATE ABOUT RACISM IN FASHION

The meat of the interview is Kanye challenging the fashion industry for not backing his projects. A lot of what he says is contradictory, at times claiming he can’t create fashion “without a backer” like Nike, at other points lambasting stars for putting their name to an existing brand rather than starting their own.

But his biggest claim, is that the fashion industry doesn’t let black people design more than T-shirts. That why he’s unable to break into an industry where there is no one, “that looks like him.”

There are certainly no racial barriers for black people in hip-hop, but in fashion, an industry which is still pivots around old elites and cultural capital, there is a case to be made that there is deep seated inequality. Rappers have made careers from apparel before, Odd Future live off the sales of their merchandise, but as Kanye points out, it’s nearly always selling T-shirts or casualwear. So he’s moving on to an arena in which there is still a battle to be fought.

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The question though, is whether the lack of black faces at the top rung of fashion is affecting his own ability to make it as a designer. The alternative, that he refuses to consider, is that his collections have just been crap and he’s confusing fashion enthusiasm for design ability.

I know fuck all about fashion or whether Kanye is good at it, so I put this question to someone who does, the editor of Guardian Fashion, Rosie Swash.

“You can't point to any one thing or person in fashion that is racist in itself but you only have to look at the overwhelmingly white bodies on the catwalks and the dearth of black designers to see that there is an issue. That's why I love that Kanye has brought up the issue, even if he is misguided in thinking that's why his womenswear collection went down so poorly (the truth is the clothes were bad. Really bad).

“In fact everything about what he said is classic Kanye: He's kind of right, what he said is kind of amazing but he had to be kind of a dick about it too. One thing is for sure: Nas was rapping about Gucci and Guess in the 1990s but it is Kanye who has brought the worlds of high fashion and hip-hop together, and that's why someone like A$AP on the front row in New York seems like a natural fit. It wouldn't have done ten years ago and Kanye has played probably the defining role in that link.”

HE MUST HAVE PISSED DRAKE OFF

Drake releases the most important record of his career in a bid to take Eminem’s vacated place in rap’s top tier, and the only thing people want to talk about is whether Kanye is the glitch from Wreck It Ralph.

HE BROUGHT EXTREME POLITICS TO RADIO 1

Over the past decade, Radio 1 has built its brand around the idea that new music is a good in itself and should be championed at the expense of critique or the exploration of the social implications around it. Zane Lowe is the embodiment of this idea, with his “hottest record in the world” feature and super muso interviewing style, Zane could interview Public Enemy for four hours and only talk about their mic technique.

It’s been a brilliant policy for championing new artists on the station, but it creates a slightly unnerving smiley totalitarianism, where every new record is *Fearne Cotton lobotomy face* totally amazing! When Radio 1 does air, often excellent, documentaries on serious issues such as racism, it does so in a very even-handed, unbiased BBC kind of way.

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Which is why when Kanye came in and said “we got this new thing called classism. It’s racism’s cousin. This is what we do to hold people back…And we got this other thing that’s also been working for a long time when you don’t have to be racist anymore, it’s called self-hate. It works on itself. It’s like real estate of racism,” it was like a hairline crack in the gleaning glass of the station. A crack that just got bigger.

Kanye discussed the racism implicit in assumptions about black public figures and the structural racism in industry and how it affects black people reaching the very top tier of society. But he did so in such a furious, obtuse and confusing manner that it left Zane speechless.

So you were left with a situation where Kanye was spewing some of the most radical race politics you’re ever likely to hear – never mind Radio 1 - on the whole of the BBC, totally unchallenged. Stuff like this:

“Everybody says, 'Who does he think he is?' I just told you who I thought I was: a God! Would it have been better if I had a song that said, 'I am a nigger? Or if I had a song that says 'I'm a gangster,' or, 'I am a pimp?' All those colorus and patinas fit better on a person like me, right? But to say you are a God, especially when you got shipped over to the country that you're in, and your last name is a slave owner's [people think] how could you have that mentality?"

Now I don’t think we should take seriously Kanye’s claim that because he was mocked for being a black guy wearing tight jeans means that we need a new civil rights movement. And I understand that fighting for racial equality within a world of multi-millionaires is a difficult cause to feel sympathetic to. But when Kanye says that his lyric “clean water was only served to fairer skin” relates to the fashion industry because “we’re making products with chitlins, t-shirts, that’s the most we can make.” There’s something to that. If Kanye talks some crap about how his fashion line represents this or that political idea everyone will chastise him. If Raf Simmons said that same thing everyone would call him a genius.

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Radio 1 should be commended for playing the interview out in full and letting those moments land, it made for the most engaging hour of radio I’ve ever heard. Zane did a great job too, although it would have been great to hear Zane force Kanye to an explanation on say, his assertion that he’s a victim of “classism”, or the use of "Blood On The Leaves", perhaps the most powerful protest song of all time, about seeing two lynched bodies, as the backing for a song about women he’s fucked. But one question left is who would have been able to talk to Kanye about that stuff? Is there anyone in television or radio highbrow enough to challenge Kanye on his politics but clued-up enough to understand what the fuck he’s talking about?

HE DOES ACTUALLY SAY SOME INTERESTING THINGS ABOUT MUSIC

As most of the interview is spent with Kanye going off on one about fashion and racism while Zane Lowe desperately tries to bring the conversation back to music, it’s easy to ignore that, in the opening couple of minutes, Kanye gives a pretty on-point critique of his own career.

One thing that stood out was his discussion of music often taking “a service position”, acting as background or a means to an emotional end. “People go on holiday and say, you got the drugs,? you got the wine? you got the music?” Music has been reduced to a lifestyle commodity. Kanye says with Yeezus he’s taking a more aggressive approach.

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He’s got a point. American pop is in perhaps the most conservative point in its musical history. Despite the wealth of exciting music that comes out of the US every day, most stations continue a rotation of less than 20 songs. Not even 20 new songs, but the same old schmuck by Maroon 5, Christina Aguilera, Adele and whatever played over the credits of that week’s Grey’s Anatomy. Most artists are so desperate to go on that tiny playlist, that they neuter their music of any originality or shock.

Yeezus obviously exists universes away from that world, whereas Cruel Summer, Kanye’s last record under the G.O.O.D. Music name, begged to be played by pop stations. What’s interesting is Kanye himself recognises this divide and can critique them. Looking at his last four albums (excluding Watch The Throne), he admits that Cruel Summer isn’t going to be a record that people are still talking about in the future and that while My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy may have been “perfect” but he’s not here to “regurgitate” and there are other things more important than that. “Trap drums and radio hits, are speaking with today’s textures,” he says, but on 808s and Yeezus, he’s “not having to speak with the textures of the time.” Those albums he says “push and redefine rap and hip-hop”.

Yeezus is clearly a masterpiece but it’s good to hear Kanye single out 808s, perhaps the most fulfilling prophecy of a Kanye record. Critically mocked on its release for its reliance on autotune, it went on not only to become the palette for every maudlin James Blakeophile in the alternative music world, but started an autotune tidal wave in bubblegum pop. Listening back to it now, you see how ahead of its time it was, and how right Kanye was to say people didn’t understand it yet.

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Elsewhere Kanye showed a subtlety to his thoughts that doesn't necessarily come across to on the record, exploring his role in the problems of materialism and how it's affecting the wider music world. On the lure of consumerism he says "I'm 100% a part of it. I 100% want to overcome it. Sometimes I'm the communicator. Sometimes I'm the maker. I am a new slave…you can be trapped to your possessions…every rap is about how much money you make, what car you got, what house you got. Rappers are trying to compete with ballplayers who are on much bigger contracts, meanwhile the music is the Titanic that's going down. And everybody from the execs to the musicians are running trying to keep their house level and car level."

Kanye’s often has the most accurate understanding of his own music. And it was astute to critique his back catalogue like this.

THE MOST FUN YOU CAN HAVE IN THE WORLD IS PLAYING THE INTERVIEW OVER RANDOM GRIME INSTRUMENTALS

Say goodbye to your afternoon:

SO WHO ACTUALLY IS KANYE WEST?

This isn’t the only interview Kanye gave this month. He also spoke with his mother-in-law Kris for an hour, talking about family life and being a father. He was warm and charming and barely went off on one. Even at the end of the Zane interview, after Zane thanks him for his time, he exhales, grins and laughs. Does he knows that at times he was just doing a Tracy Jordan impression? He must know he can’t genuinely compare the sit-ins to making a non-radio friendly album? Or that it’s genetically passed on in his family to win “best dressed” in the high school yearbook? Or does he? Because what happened in the interview wasn’t a persona. It was definitely him, coming from the heart. We’re use to characters in pop, but not the subtle, blurred personality shifts that Kanye seems to engage in. It leaves a big question mark over who the hell Kanye actually is. Or whether he has a reality at all.

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