Oh. My. Yeezus.
As if we need a reminder of the now infamous MTV Video Music Awards incident involving a bubbly Taylor Swift and Kanye West, the rapper himself reveals exactly how he made it through the backlash following the 2009 crime of music.
In a recent chat with Interview magazine, "12 Years a Slave" director Steve McQueen broaches West on this very topic. “How did you deal with it all mentally, physically, and spiritually?” McQueen prodded, to which the 36-year-old performer replied, “It’s funny that you would say ‘mentally, physically, spiritually’ because my answer before you even said that was going to be “god, sex, and alcohol.”
West added, “I don’t have an addictive personality, so that means that I can lean on what might be someone else’s vice just enough to make it through to the next day. You know, just enough religion, a half-cup of alcohol with some ice in it and a nice chaser, and then I’d make it to the next week.”
Well, now we know how he doesn’t deal with such public displays of confrontation: write a song about it.
Also, in the lengthy interview, West confessed what it’s like to be a father, bestowing unconditional love onto his daughter, North. “It’s all brand new, how it feels to be a father,” he said. “There are some things that I understand, certain things that I don’t understand, certain things that I like to get off my chest in interviews, certain things that I want to talk about. But when we talk about love, I don’t have an answer. All I can say is that I’m happy I have it.”
West’s latest music video, “Bound 2,” features his fiancé Kim Kardashian and sparked quite a bit of controversy across the web. “It’s a dream, and I think the controversy comes from the fact that I don’t think most people are comfortable with their own dreams, so it’s hard for them to be comfortable with other people’s dreams,” he explained. “I mean, look, it took some time for us to be comfortable with a walking, talking mouse, but that became an icon. So this stuff, what I’m doing now, is the beginning of me throwing out what it means to be a rapper—you know, with the gold chain…”
As far as his creative side is concerned, West boasted, “Well, I’m a trained fine artist. I went to art school from the time I was 5 years old. I was, like, a prodigy out of Chicago. I’d been in national competitions from the age of 14. I got three scholarships to art schools—to St. Xavier, to the American Academy of Art, and to the Art Institute of Chicago—and I went to the American Academy of Art.”
He continued, “So the joke that I’ve actually played on everyone is that the entire time, I’ve actually just been a fine artist. I just make sonic paintings, and these sonic paintings have led me to become whatever people think of when you say ‘Kanye West.’”
“Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had,” he added, praising his fellow musician and groundbreaking artist. “If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way.”
Relive that magical VMA moment:
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