Kanye West is not pissed; he’s just in problem-solving mode. Right now, the problem is production costs. “I want to be the No. 1 artist,” he says to a member of his crew. “How am I gonna do that with muthafuckin’ bad lighting?”
It’s a different backstage scene from the one that has haunted West since September, when a secretly taped tirade he threw at MTV’s Video Music Awards lit up You Tube and deepened his rep as a sour-grapes hothead. In his dressing room at Boston’s TD Banknorth Garden arena, West forgoes scenery chewing for a bag of chips—fuel for tonight’s show. He’s topping an all-star lineup at Monster Jam, a radio station event that, the night after the Red Sox win the World Series, brings 17,000 fans to a fever pitch without a single note of “Sweet Caroline.”
Not that West would be above biting that Neil Diamond hit. On Graduation, the 30-year-old producer turned rapper has sampled nearly a dozen superstar and indie-chic acts—including Elton John, Michael Jackson, kraut rockers Can, and French disco giants Daft Punk—and spliced them into one of the year’s best-selling albums, a lean, genre-leveling tour de force of hard beats and whopping pop hooks. It’s a calculated departure from West’s more sprawling The College Dropout (2004) and Late Registration (2005), a blatant move to go mass.
And it seems to have worked. West came out on the winning end of his release-date showdown with 50 Cent when Graduation debuted at the top of Billboard’s pop chart with sales of 957,000. That same week, Graduation’s first three singles—“Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” “Stronger,” and “Good Life”—were dominating the Hot 100, with “Stronger,” West’s muscular remake of Daft Punk’s 2001 “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” in the peak position (see sidebar on page 65). An international smash, “Stronger” is the triumph West hopes will help fulfill his excruciatingly earnest dream to be “the No. 1 artist.” The pouty flip side of that yearning gets exposed every time he is denied another career-validating moment on TV. His fantasy of pop glory, it seems, and his underdog’s craving for respect won’t be complete until he hoists an Album of the Year Grammy in front of his peers and a viewing audience of millions. He has lost in that category twice.
But even less coveted prizes have eluded him. At the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards, West’s ambitious “Touch the Sky” video lost top honors to a scruffy clip for Justice Vs Simian’s “We Are Your Friends.” In reaction, West drifted onto the stage and began his now infamous “Oh, hell no” rant—a public embarrassment he partly exorcised by parodying it this past September on Saturday Night Live.
A little too late, it turned out. Three weeks earlier, his backstage outburst at the VMAs (ten F-bombs in a minute and eight seconds) may have irreversibly damaged his relationship with the network. It was motivated, he says, not by an ongoing denial of VMA love but by MTV’s decision to relegate his on-air performance to a suite far removed from the show’s main stage.
Getting his fix of high fashion and fine art on Boston’s Newbury Street the day of Monster Jam, the “Louis Vuitton don” is anything but crazed—even though we first meet at the Martin Lawrence Gallery. In fact, he’s unaffected
enough that virtually no one on the sidewalk recognizes him, despite the five-strong posse and trailing black Suburban. He’s perusing some of his favorite artists today—Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, Andy Warhol, and Takashi Murakami, the Japanese visionary who did Graduation’s cover.
In the Polo store, West slips into a $700 wool-and-suede sweater. “Yo, don’t buy that; you can have mine,” says his perpetually texting co-manager, Don C. At a gallery up the block, West seriously considers a stunner from Warhol’s Marilyn series. Price: $185,000. He’s rocked, too, by Jules, an eerily familiar Robert Longo piece. “Is that the picture they used in American Psycho?! Damn!”
It’s a rare few hours of relaxation in what has been a frantic week of globetrotting (a Spin photo shoot and Murakami opening in L.A. the night before, a concert in Dubai three days before that). Frantic will turn to tragic less than two weeks later, when West—in London preparing for a series of U.K. shows—will receive the devastating news that his 58-year-old mother, Donda West, has died, reportedly of complications from cosmetic surgery. Even casual fans know the story of Kanye’s upbringing in his beloved Chicago under the care of his single-parent mom, a career academic whose dreams of success for her son got gently teased but ultimately fulfilled with the release of his three pointedly titled albums. Given the closeness of their relationship and the emotionally naked way in which West, an only child, lives every day and every thing, it’s difficult to imagine how he’ll get through—except to become, well, stronger.
We talked backstage at the Garden before his world got turned upside down—or, more accurately, when it was just a whirl of the usual Kanye-isms: enthusiasm and ambition, candor and combustibility, and a mix of bluster and uncertainty that makes him the award-show irritant most worth rooting for.
How did playing to those crowds change your approach to making Graduation? I way simplified my rap style on this record. [Those crowds] were looking at me like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
By simplified, do you mean fewer words or leaner rhyme schemes? Everything. Fewer words. If you come in the room and say one thing, it better be the most powerful thing.
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