S. Samuel
Troubled rapper/producer Kanye West explains his arduous return to hip-hop in a new feature he penned for the October issue of XXL Magazine.
Within the piece, Yeezy recalls crafting his resurgence at the start of 2010.
“I spent the last year improving every element of myself as a person. By default, my raps are way better now, because I’m at a point where I don’t have to come up with lines–I just think of what I’m really doing and make it rhyme. January first of this year, I started back in the studio. I knew for a while I was going to start that day. I still had a lot of pain, and I needed to write that pain out, and it’s on my new album. But toward the end is when the Kanye West music really came. Everything is a form of my music, but the style of 808s & Heartbreak is better served by Drake and Kid Cudi than it is by me. I think they could both carry that sound better than I could, and also being that Cudi helped design that sound. That style of music is very nighttime, very streetlights. It’s, like, ‘streetlights glowing.’ All that.” (XXL Magazine)
Ye also opens up about escaping the media spotlight after infamously disrupting country singer Taylor Swift‘s Video Music Awards 2009 trophy acceptance speech.
“The relationship with the public and with your fans is like the relationship with your girlfriend. How could I not, at a certain point, be like, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been at the awards show. I’m sorry.’ Not that I don’t deserve to get beat up or change who I am inside, to make sure that that doesn’t happen again…I knew I wasn’t in a great spot publicly after the incident, but I would just block it out and work as hard as possible and let my work be my saving grace. In a way, I had thrown a Molotov cocktail at my own career, and it gave me an opportunity, for the first time, to go away and find out who I was. Because I felt very alone.” (XXL Mag)
West recently spoke on the incident’s impact on his life and whether or not he could truly move on.
“It was just such a hard, shell-shocking year. Because there was no bad intent on my part, it’s just more bad timing. It was purely good intent. So to have been dragged through that for a year, it’s just amazing. I mean, I don’t know if it’s over. I’ll probably wear the scar for the rest of my life.” (Beat Crave)
In early September, Ye tweeted an apology to Swift.
“Man I love Twitter… I’ve always been at the mercy of the press but no more… The media tried to demonize me,” Ye tweeted yesterday (September 4th).
“They wanted yall to believe I was a monster in real life so you guys wouldn’t listen or buy my music anymore.”
“I feel like they were waiting for the opportunity to go in all the way on me and when it came they beat me to a pulp”
“I want to win there hearts back so I can continue to bring my take on culture to the masses with a clean opinion.”
“It starts with this…I’m sorry Taylor.” (Kanye West’s Twitter)
Check out a recent Kanye West interview below:
