12 Things We Learned In The Kanye West GQ Profile [Photos]

Photo: AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau

Yeezy has a new single on the way called “All Day.”

“…Do you want the pendulum to swing back and do something more pop, like Twisted Fantasy orGraduation? 
“I think just my usual pattern is like that. It’s like a pendulum. The pendulum gains momentum by swinging in the other direction. Even lyrically, I think about certain lines that I say on my new single, which is called “All Day,” that usually Jay would say, but Jay’s not on there. So I say,All day, ni**a, it’s Ye, ni**a. Shopping for the winter, it’s just May, ni**a. Ball so hard, man, this shit cray, nigga. You ain’t getting money unless you got eight figures. Right? Jay would have said that. And then eventually I would have came in with, like, whatever I come in with. But the balance of a meal is that when people walk in, they want water first. People definitely weren’t getting water first on Yeezus. I do fight with myself to say, “Keep fighting.” But also, you know, you can’t win every single fight. It’s a long war, and if you’re out there trying to, like, blow up every single building, you won’t win the war.”

West admits that Drake is at the top the rap heap, for now.

“Currently that spot is taken,” West says. “Let’s be honest—he got last summer.”

Who?

“You know. There’s only one person.”

Drake?

“Yeah. He got last summer. And I’d never given it up till last summer.” Now he’s thinking about taking it back. “It’s a real question for me. Do I want to?”

Page Six was trolling.

 “The New York Post’s Page Six has an account of your wedding that reads, in part: “Kanye returned one hour before the wedding and didn’t like the all-white bar that was in front of the Gold Toilet Tower. He took a saw and started sawing it in half himself. Two men held the bar stable as he sawed, and sawed, into the bar, defacing the entire front, screaming at everyone around him. He said it looked like a bar from Texas. Then he ordered two pieces of raw wood to be nailed onto the front of the bar. Once the wood was in place, ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it’s art.’ The Italian construction teams looked at this guy and couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”
For the person that wrote that, were they involved with anything last year that was as culturally significant as the Yeezus tour or that album? They didn’t even talk there about the photographs, or the dress, or Andrea Bocelli singing, or the marble tables. They’re like: “It’s a gold toilet.” No. The bathrooms—that usually would be a porta-potty—were wrapped in a fabric that was neutral to match the fort. The bar was terrible, and the wedding planner didn’t approve it with me. I was having issues with this wedding planner the entire time on approvals, and I get there and they threw some weird plastic bar there. So the same materials that were used to cover the bathroom, we said, “Let’s just use that, because this is all we have to make the bar look better.” Which it did, in the end. And anyone knows that you cannot pick up tools yourself, because of—what are those rules about the workers?”

At least 50% of the shoes Balenciaga sells is because of Yeezy, according to Yeezy.

“Listen to what I’m saying—me, as Kanye West: I guarantee you, I’m more than 50 percent responsible for every men’s shoe that they sell. Me, the singular person. More than 50 percent responsible for every Balenciaga shoe they sell. And they would say, “You can’t come to the show, because you are a celebrity.” But all honesty, no ego, I have a level of influence, and I have a level of respect for the designers. And we move product on that Barneys floor.”

Photo: WENN.com

When discussing why he got married (to inspire people, apparently), Yeezy quoted Step Brothers.

“Right now, people look at it and it’s like, “Wow, that’s inspiring.” Meaning that love is infectious. You know, God is infectious—God flowing through us and us being little-baby creators and shit. But His energy and His love and what He wants us to have as people and the way He wants us to love each other, that is infectious. Like they said in Step Brothers: Never lose your dinosaur. This is the ultimate example of a person never losing his dinosaur. Meaning that even as I grew in cultural awareness and respect and was put higher in the class system in some way for being this musician, I never lost my dinosaur.”

Yes, Yeezy’s wedding toast was 45 minutes, but he wasn’t talking about himself.

“In the speech, I talked about the idea of collaboration and all the people involved working together and being able to change things. Meaning there was a time for two or three years where fashion designers wouldn’t give Kim dresses. There was a time they wouldn’t even let me be at shows. Now the idea that Kim is in a Givenchy Couture dress is raising the communication. Because people would be more apt to be like, “Celebrities don’t really have style. Celebrities can’t dress…

So I said, “Wow, Carine is seven seats down from Kim. Farnaz [Farjam], the producer of the Kardashians and the producer of The Real World, is four seats down from [director] Steve McQueen. And four seats, because in between them is Hosain [Rahman] from Jawbone.” This is what I talked about. That was not a forty-five-minute speech to myself. Do you realize what that means for those people to be in that close of a proximity to each other?”

Carine Roitfeld was sitting next to Kim Kardashian at the wedding, and that’s very important. Like Jay Z & Mos Def in the studio important.

 “I was so moved that I just wanted people to stop and think they weren’t sitting at a table full of fashion people, they weren’t sitting at a table full of celebrities, they weren’t sitting at a table full of movie directors. It really was a representation of the way we receive information today, post-Internet. And so Page Six can’t overshadow the main point: Carine Roitfeld was sitting next to Kim Kardashian. That alone to me is like the same moment when I brought Mos Def to the studio with Jay Z. It’s about the people, and the fact that they’re from different walks of life, and that they’re working together and not discriminating against each other. There was a class system, and now there’s a creative class system, and I think that’s what you were talking about a bit—the class system of creativity.”

Yeezy gives all the credit to that most liked Instagram pic ever to Kim, and makes sure to name drop, too.

“…There’s no photo that I would have put up by myself, or next to one of my smarty friends, that would have got that amount of likes. So now you take this photo that has that amount of likes, and it has a flower wall from the same guy who does the Lanvin shows, and it has a couture Givenchy dress and Givenchy tuxedo in it. That’s the point. Now the thing that is the most popular is also communicating the highest level of creativity. The concept of Kimye has more cultural significance than what Page Six could write.”

Yes, he still loves Yeezus.

“I think Yeezus is the beginning of a completely new era of music.”

Photo: Maria Fitzsimons/WENN.com

And, “New Slaves” has the best rap verse of all-time. All. Time.

“New Slaves.” The second verse. I argue that it’s the best rap verse of all time. It’s the Coming to America or Anchorman of a verse. You know, it’s got the funny shit. It’s got the antagonization. It’s got patterns. It’s got social and political consciousness. It’s got struggle. It’s got bravado. It’s everything that a rap verse is supposed to be.

Photo: WENN.com

West fell back from the Internets out of respect for Kim.

“In 2010 you put out My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, released a new record every Friday, you were on Twitter all the time, you were still blogging at that point… You lived a whole year in public. 
Yeah.

But you fell back from that.
Both me and Kim had to learn how to communicate as a team. These are two LeBrons, you know? Meaning she could do shit that a girlfriend in a relationship could never do. Obviously. And I could do stuff that a guy in a relationship could never do. So if you look at half my tweets back then, they were always, like, funny tweets that I wouldn’t be able to say now. It wouldn’t be respectful to my relationship. It’s interesting, as I’m delving into being married: Like, what is my verbal creative communication? That’s another thing I really like about clothing and film—you could still communicate with a film, because it’s not you. But when you’re a reality star or a rapper, you are the film.”

We can expect a new Kanye West album in September, or at least by the end of the year.

“What about the new record? How far away is that?
I don’t know, man. I hope I can get one of these songs out in the next couple of weeks, just to have something up and running. But I think most likely September. I go back and forth. Like, should it be September or should it be October? Should it be November? When Beyoncé was working on her last album, she took a while. I was thinking it could somehow come out in June, like Yeezus, and just kill it for the summer. But then I’m like, I have to work on Adidas and be with my child.”

Read the entire GQ profile right here.