Dissect - S8E1 - Kanye West: YEEZUS

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Our season-long dissection of Yeezus by Kanye West begins now! After revisiting the album’s polarizing impact in 2013, we set up our song by song analysis of Yeezus with a brief discussion of how Kanye uses his albums to tell larger stories about his life. We then document the real life events that inspired the creation of Yeezus, including Kanye’s struggles breaking into the fashion industry, his new relationship with Kim Kardashian, and the many classic interviews that accompanied the Yeezus era. Limited Season 8 merchandise is available at shop.dissectpodcast.com. Follow @dissectpodcast on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know you can listen to all your favorite podcasts, including this one, free on Spotify? In beginning August 2nd, Spotify is going to become the exclusive home for all past and future episodes of Dissect. That means wherever you're listening right now, Dissect will no longer be available after August 2nd. So it's more important than ever that you download the free Spotify app on your phone, search for Dissect, and tap the follow button to get new episodes right in your library. You can even binge the entire Yeezza season for free right now. So download Spotify for free today and never miss a new episode of Dyset. Paris, 1913.

We're inside the brand new Sean's Elyse Theater. The audience is dressed in their finest diamonds and fur, settling in for the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's new ballet, The Ride of Spring. Stravinsky is a young rising star composer coming off two massively successful compositions. And rumor has it, Stravinsky's new piece is different, challenging. avant-garde even, but no one's expecting a riot. As the curtains rise, the orchestra begins playing this. No melody, no harmonic movement.

It's just this one chord, this dissonance, thumping over and over and over, 59 times. The audience erupts. Booze, kisses, cat calls. Stravinsky defenders in the crowd shout back at the critics. It gets so loud the musicians can barely hear themselves play. A producer flashes the house lights on and off trying to contain the chaos. Some say punches are thrown, objects are tossed on stage, and some 40 people are ejected from the theater.

Rhode Island, 1965. We're at the annual Newport Folk Festival, where the world's top folk musicians take the stage to perform intimate, socially conscious songs. The large crowd of folk purists and beatnicks are waiting for one of the festival's biggest names, Bob Dylan. Dubbed the spokesman of a generation, Dylan is considered the leading songwriter of the folk revival movement and his anthem, The Times They Are Changing, is the current soundtrack to the anti-war and civil rights movements. Dylan had performed at the festival the previous two years, both times accompanied by only his acoustic guitar and harmonica, such was the standard. But here, now, Dylan takes the stage with a full rock band, an electric guitar draped over his black leather jacket. The band is so low,

loud that it drowns out the booing and cackling that begins emerging from the audience. But as soon as Dylan finishes the first song, the crowd's reaction seems to resound just as loud as the band. The crowd is polarized. Booze and cheers compete for dominance. But Dylan ignores the reaction, instead going right into a brand new song, like a Rolling Stone. Dylan in this band would only play three songs that night, but it was enough to outrage folk purists who felt their savior betrayed them. Dylan would be tagged with the nickname, Judas after the apostle who portrayed Jesus. As one attendee put it, quote,

you don't whistle in church and you don't play rock and roll at a folk festival. 2013, New York. It's nearly two in the morning and a crowd gathers in front of Manhattan's Saks Fifth Avenue Prada location. People aren't waiting to get inside the luxury store. They're waiting to see what's happening outside of it. An enormous 30-foot black and white projection is thrown directly onto the Prada building. It's an extreme close-up of the face of Kanye West, who is premiering a new song and video.

Guerrilla, no-permit projections like this one are happening tonight across 66 locations around the world. At the moment, Kanye is in the midst of one of the greatest runs in music history. After its infamous Taylor Swift debacle at the VMAs, Kanye fell from public grace only to ascend to even greater heights thanks to an extraordinary run of albums, including 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and 2011's Watched the throne with Jay-Z. Kanye also had the world's hottest sneaker, the Nike Air Yeezy 2, which were reselling for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay.

Everything Kanye touched right now turned to gold. Now outside of Prada, the opening moments of his highly anticipated new song blare out into the dark Manhattan streets, and Kanye's enormous projection begins to rap. My mama was raised in the era when clean water was only served to the ferrettes. There's skin, doing clothes you would have thought I had hell, but they wasn't satisfied unless I picked the cot and myself. You see it's broke, nigger. There's no drums, no catchy hook, really nothing that resembles a traditional hip-hop beat.

And Kanye's rap's, they're hostile, combative, a scathing critique of the very high-fashioned establishments his face is being projected upon. New Slaves was the first taste of Kanye's upcoming coming album, released a month later on June 18, 2013. While new slaves seemed to be a warning shot of things to come, no one expected what they heard when pushing play for the first time. It was Kanye's right of spring, his version of going electric. It was Kanye West's Yeezis. Kanye West's Yeezis as an antagonistic, no-fuck-whatever y'all been here.

middle finger in the form of music. The album turns its back on the self-described apology music of my beautiful dark-twisted fantasy, instead favoring distorted sounds inspired by French electro and lyrics that look to incite a riot of its own. Songs like Black Skinhead are a one-man wrecking ball aimed to instigate a social rebellion. Meanwhile, songs like I Am a God take Kanye's infamous egotism to 11. Unlike Stravinsky or Dylan, there wasn't a single physical space where reactions to Kanye's new work could be heard. Rather, reactions to Yeezus centralized on the 21st century's version of the public square,

the internet. The fucking album is the worst fucking album. This album, in a word, is incredibly middle brow. Yeezus is a disaster. This is a Fisher Price, my first experimental album. I look at this like a little kid that's trying to get my attention by tugging on my shirt. And if I'm ignoring him long enough, he's going to go light something on fire. This motherfucker is garbage.

dude, like, I'm trying to figure out. Like, he fucking sucked. Kanye, for his part, was prepared for the backlash. An interview after interview, he came ready for war, verbally bulldozing any perceived walls the public tried to put around him. You can't marginalize me. You can't tell me what creativity I'm supposed to do on this earth. You can't control me.

So, you know, all corporations, radio stations, y'all can't control me. Y'all don't understand that. I'm turned all the way. I believe in me. Just believe in you. Let me do me. You like it. Cool. You don't. Fast forward. Do whatever you're going to do, but you're not going to bully me. You're not going to stop me because my mother made me believe in myself. No matter how many people tell me, stop believing in yourself. Stop saying what you can do. Stop affirming what you're going to do and then and then completing that in real life.

That's the improper way to do it. I refuse to follow those rules that society is set up in the way that they control people with low self-esteem. Yeezis left fans every bit as polarized as Stravinsky and Dylan. But despite the opening night riot, Stravinsky's right of spring went on to become the most important composition of the 20th century. Despite the booze and Judas slurs, Dylan's electrified rock sound fueled two of the 1960s most important albums, and like a Rolling Stone became one of the most iconic, influential songs of the entire century. Because this is how history works. The greatest artistic leaps forward are almost always met with resistance. But the art endures and any immediate controversy becomes mere footnotes. If anything, controversy only adds to the legend. While Kanye West the man has always been

controversial, his music was universal. Yeez's changed everything. But is it really Kanye's right of spring, his historic electrified rolling stone, or is it merely a failed experiment, an overly ambitious flop? Let's Dysect and find out. From Spotify, welcome to Season 8 of Dysect, a 12-episode musical and lyrical analysis of Kanye West Yeez-Sys. I'm your host, Cole Kushner. If I did the Twister song, I was making that shit like it was a sitcom itself, or like a piece of a movie or something.

The black album was like the black movie or something. So its own soundtracks is like scores to scenes that's going on in a movie. This is Connie West in 2002, when he was still just a young producer, making beats for other artists. He's in the studio about to play a new beat for rapper Jay Z, and Kanye is telling Jay how he makes music as if they're scenes in a movie. After this speech,

Kanye plays the beat for what would eventually become Jay's song, Lucifer. This record ain't a record, it's a movie and shit. Like a scene from a movie. Kanye tells Jay, this record ain't a record. it's a movie and shit, like a scene from a movie. Even as a producer, before Kanye's first solo album as an artist, his approach to music was cinematic.

When he began making albums of his own, he took this approach to another level, as his albums unfold like stories, often using the same narrative devices as any book or movie would. There's usually a larger story at hand detailing the plight of a central character, and that character is most often Kanye West. Yisus is no different.

The album follows, follows a central character, Yeezus, through a hero's journey that begins as a battle against society's racism and classism, but ultimately transforms into a confrontation with the greatest opponent any of us can ever face, ourselves. Like all of Kanye's albums, this narrative is based on real events in his life, specifically those that occurred between 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in the summer of 2013, when Yeezus was released. Before we get into our song-by-songday section of Yeasus, we're going to use today's episode. to first discuss how Kanye tells stories through his music, using his debut album, The College Dropout, as an example.

We'll then detail the real-life events that were used as the basis to the central story captured in Yeezus. Understanding these events and how they fueled Yeezus will be critical to understanding the album as a whole, and will explain how Kanye went from starting an album like this, to starting his next album like this. Well, I'm just a creative, I'm more like a Walt Disney or something. Like rap is just a chamber of my thoughts. It's something that I really wanted to express as a modern day poet. Because, you know, if I lived in the past lifetime, maybe I would have been a playwright or something.

But in this lifetime, to be the most turn, the most relevant, the most relevant is to be a rap, rock star. You know what I'm saying? And you can express, you know, at the highest level there. And for me, I came from, you know, art school and everything. I would, you know, draw at all these. ideas and all these concepts and the more and more I get to create the younger and younger and younger I feel. As revealed here, Kanye's conceptual approach to art began even before he was a producer or rapper, began as a child. More than anything, Kanye West is a creative, and his choice to pursue

music specifically seems fueled by its ability to give in the biggest platform to express his ideas, concepts, and stories. As a musician, Kanye uses every facet of the medium, from his lyrics, samples, soundscapes, cover art, and track order to express these concepts. Though by his own admission, if playwriting gave him the biggest platform today, he'd be a playwright. Kanye nonetheless incorporates traditional storytelling techniques throughout his discography. Many of his projects use a distinct, familiar three-act structure, like on the college dropout or graduation. Others, like 808s and Heartbreak, rely on a more conceptual pattern with orchestrated movements. Either way, Kanye's albums always contain a central story that introduces a character, gives us insight into his life,

then ends with that character in either a higher or lower state of being. Like any good protagonist, he learns, grows, and evolves, for better or for worse. Mind you, it might be an exaggerated version of Kanye West in his life, but that's how many stories operate. The French even have a term for this, Roma a cre, which means novel with a key. The key in this case refers to knowing real-world details in order to decode elements of the story. It was originally used to share scandalous gossip of Parisian public figures without naming names. But over time, the technique became less superficial and more existential, more cathartic. Sylvia Plath used it in her novel The Bell Jar to explore her time in New York City and the onset of mental illness. Stephen King

worked through his struggles with alcoholism via the Jack Torrance character and The Shining. The movie equivalent is called film a clay and includes auteur works like saving private Ryan, Magnolia, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. We might dub Kanye's albums Music Aclay as his music becomes a sonic blueprint, a lyrical narrative that explores the events in his life. As an example of this, let's go back to the beginning, Kanye's 2004 debut album The College Dropout, in very meta fashion, it dramatizes Kanye's ascendancy as an artist. In the first act of the college dropout, Kanye speaks from the very real perspective

of someone living in Chicago, struggling to get by but with a dream of his music being a spaceship that will lift him into a new world. In the album's second act, his hard work has paid off. He's ascended. Over the course of four songs, get him high, new workout plan, slow jams, and breathe in, breathe out. Kanye shows his struggles with trying to make pop music. These tracks are a far cry from the conscious efforts in Act 1 that focused on the human condition of people living in the hood of Chicago. Kanye has become more of a salesman than a chronicler.

There's a hollow kind of catchiness to these batch of songs. As we move into the third act, Kanye channels his dropout spirit. He uses dropping out of college as a metaphor for how to be. he won't be like other commercial artists who follow the industry's rules. He's going to be himself. This allows Kanye to end the album on a sprint of songs that see him take his place in the industry while still managing to be one with the people. On the album's final track, Last Call, West explains his journey from being another kid in Chicago to signing with Rockefeller Records. So if it wasn't clear before what Dropout was about,

Last Call provides the key to the Roma acclaid. So I'll play them these post-blueprint beats or whatever, and then I play my shit. I'd be like, yo, but I rap too. Hey, I guess they're looking at me crazy because, you know, because I ain't have a jersey on or whatever. Everybody out there listen to, I played them Jesus walks and they didn't sign me. This concluding speech encapsulates why so many of us fell in love with Kanye and his music. He seems to speak from his soul. You could feel his emotion, his hunger, and raw passion.

and while many of us might not be conscious of it, it's his talent as a storyteller that makes his music so inspirational and relatable. That's because stories have this amazing power to alter the way we perceive the world and interact with others. A well-told story can make you realize something new about yourself, make you feel empathy for others, make the world a more open and progressive place. It's a phenomenon that scientists have studied for decades, called Theory of Mind. Here's German developmental psychologist Uda Firth explaining the theory. Theory of Mind is a nickname.

It's really intended to refer to the ability that we all have, the human beings, to understand other human beings, not in terms of how they behave, what they do, but in terms of what they feel. It's as if we had an invisible GPS in our brain, which navigates us around. the social world, what other people do, without us even thinking about it. While theory of mind has been studied by neurologists since the early 1980s,

it wasn't until the 2000s that psychologist Raymond Marr made the connection between theory of mind and stories. In several studies, Marr found that narratives allow artists to manifest living, breathing maps that detail other people's intentions. This means that when we read books, watch movies, TV shows, or listen to music, we identify with the character's passions, their fears, their regrets, their failures. Through this shared experience, we learn to better navigate our own lives. As Professor Keith Oatley wrote, quote, fiction is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky. Novels, stories, and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life, unquote. What Professor

Otley gets at here is that we're often as confused by our own behavior as we are the behavior of others. But narrative art provides insight into what motivates a character's behavior. It strengthens our own GPS, which then allows us to estimate what motivated our own behavior or someone else's. For both the artist and the audience, such knowledge is incredibly powerful because it can make a tremendous difference in how we respond to the ups and downs of day-to-day life and the larger curveballs were faced. As documented on the college dropout, Connie's true goal was to become a rapper, one that he finally accomplished despite seemingly everyone doubting his skill and marketability. Thanks to theory of mind, when he tells this story through

his music, his journey, in a sense, becomes our own, which makes triumphant songs like Through the Wire such a cathartic and empowering experience, because his win is our win too. This rap label of Graham, but he wasn't talking about coke and birds. It was more like spoken word, except he's really putting it down. And he explained the story about how blacks came from glory and what we need to do in a game. Go listen to all my music. It's the codes of self-esteem. It's the codes of who you are.

If you're a Kanye West fan, you're not a fan of me. You're a fan of yourself. You will believe in yourself. I'm just the espresso. I'm just a shot in the morning to get you going. to make you believe that you could overcome that situation that you're dealing with all the time. Forget the bloated celebrity image and the rampant ego. Kanye, as an artist, has always been vulnerable and human with his music.

And again, thanks to theory of mind, it's through his music that we're able to intuit what Kanye truly experiences internally every step of his career. In the first few episodes of Dysect Season 2 on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, we tracked Kanye's early life and music up until the release of Twisted. fantasy. If you're interested, I would direct you to those episodes for a more comprehensive look at the interaction between Kanye's life and music. Today, we're going to pick up where we left off, at the end of twisted fantasy and the pivotal life events that led to the creation of Yeezis. That's right after the break. Welcome back to Dissect. Before the break, we discussed

Kanye as a storyteller, using his first album the college dropout to showcase how he uses events in his real life as the foundation for the narratives contained in his music. After the college dropout, Kanye would of course continue to ascend from the world's hottest producer to the world's hottest artist. The album late registration saw 2005 Kanye juxtapose his early, dewy-eyed, modest years with his newfound celebrity, while the album graduation found Kanye falling prey to the ugliest aspects of stardom and succumbing to its vices. While Kanye had always planned to follow up graduation with an album titled Good As Job, playing into the college theme of his first three projects, the sudden death of Kanye's mother, Dr. Donda West,

and the separation with his longtime partner and fiancé, took his life and career into new emotional and musical territory. To express the waywardness and loneliness felt from these losses, Kanye stepped away from the chipmunk soul samples that defined his music to embrace a sparse electronic aesthetic for his 808 and heartbreak. While it's far different from the sound of Yeezus, 808 showcased Kanye's ability and creative need, to reinvent himself when his emotional state and story demanded a different sonic environment.

Amidst the deterioration of his personal life, Kanye drunkenly took the stage at the 2009 VMAs in what is now considered one of the most infamous and influential events in pop culture history. Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'm let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time. Connie may have thought he be vindicated and praised for what in his mind was a heroic defense of Beyoncé. But instead, he was shunned, abandoned, canceled, as we say now. Despite Kanye's public apologies, fans and haters alike turned their backs on him. Even though his ego had made him a controversial figure for years, this was the first time the repercussions had been so immense.

The public in the music industry were more than ready to cast Kanye's side. The sitting president Barack Obama called him a jackass. Joe Jackson, the father of one of Kanye's heroes, Michael Jackson, made the public statement, quote, They should blackball him out of show business for that. And many agreed. A large stadium tour Kanye had lined up with Lady Gaga got the act shortly after. Ironically, the title of this canceled tour was,

Fame kills. From the outside, it seems Kanye never much cared if anyone thinks he's a jerk. What he does care about, however, is the ability to reach people with his art. So in the year leading up to the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, his response to the fallout from the VMAs.

Kanye knew he had to create something that would remind everyone that however they felt about him personally, they still needed his music. I fantasize about this back in Chicago, mercy, mercy, me, that mercy alive go, that's me the first year that I blow. The praise for twisted fantasy was near universal.

It was given perfect scores by many major media outlets and topped numerous album of the year list. By the end of the 2010s, music fans and critics alike recognize twisted fantasy as not only one of the best projects of the decade, but also a turning point for hip-hop. For instance, a song like Runaway is now widely deemed as one of the greatest songs ever produced. The irony of all of this is that in the face of The irony of all of this is that in the face of being cancelled, my beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy wasn't even an album Kanye wanted to make. Three years after the VMA incident,

the New York Times asked Kanye if he regretted running up on stage during Taylor Swift's moment. Kanye said he didn't. In fact, it seems all he regretted doing was saying that he was sorry. Quote, Dark Fantasy was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like all these raps, all these sonic acrobats.

I was like, let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back. You want to have me on your shelves, unquote. Connie seems to constantly feel pulled by the Celebrity Society pressures him to be, and the man he wants to be, the artist he wants to be, the leader he wants to be. This is the same conflict at the heart of the college dropout. Kanye wants to report on the pernicious and prolific influence of consumerism and materialism, But people want slow jams, they want bullshit ice rap, they want to be sold a new workout plan that promises them unrealistic life-altering secrets.

This conflict, this push-pull is our key to understanding Twisted Fantasy's final song Lost in the World. After an album with Sonic Acrobatics, Kanye still doesn't know what to do or where to go. This is where he's at in life, lost and all alone. But then, two minutes into the song, there's suddenly an important, and glimmer of something, something more than stardom, something that's potentially life-saving. In Kanye's lone verse, we hear a poem that he wrote for a woman he long had feelings for. You're my devil, you're my angel, you're my heaven, you're my hell, you're my now, you're my forever, you're my freedom, you're my jail, you're my lies, you're my truth, you're my war, you're my truths, you're my questions, you're my proof.

After all the pain and misery, Kanye faced on the album, Lost in the World, with it a glimmer of hope. Maybe there's a way out of the disenchanting fantasy Kanye has found himself in, a way out of the fake-ass party, the plastic life. Only years later would it come out that the lyrics for Lost in the World were originally written in 2009 as a poem for his future wife Kim Kardashian. But at the time Kanye wrote the poem, Kim was in a serious relationship with NFL player Reggie Bush. Despite that, Kanye saw Kim, even then, as his salvation, possibly out of reach. Thus, he remained lost in the world. In 2011, following the release of Twisted Fantasy, Kanye would go back to his roots, making music with Jay Z. The two recorded the

album Watch the Throne for most of the year's first half. It was a full circle moment for Kanye, as Jay was one of the people skeptical about Connie's ability to rap prior to the college dropout. Now, almost a decade later, he was no longer just a producer pitching beats for Jay's next record, Kanye was on equal footing with his hero. And last party we had, they shut down pre-vades. Ain't that where they he play, niggins hate fallers these days. Ain't that like LeBron James? Ain't that just like Dway?

Wait, what you need. Once Watch the Throne was released in August, Kanye and Jay spent October, November, and December on tour. A quote, spectacle of ego summarizes the enduring reputation of Watch the Throne in its tour. Two of the greatest hip-hop artists ever joined forces to snap a sonic picture of their success, immortalizing the height they had achieved. The popularity of the album made 2011 a year Kanye could, albeit cautiously,

returned to the forefront of pop culture. Twisted's fantasy had reminded everyone of his artistic prowess, and Throne served as his official welcome-back party. It was around this time that Kanye really tried his hand at fashion and design. Over the years, Kanye had had a string of disparate fashion ventures. In 2005, he expressed interest in launching a clothing line called pastel. In 2006, he created several one-off pairs of Nike AirMax 180s. In 2007, he designed a trainer with the streetwear label A Bathing Ape. Then in 2009, Kanye and Nike released the first run of the Nike Air Yeezys, Kanye's signature shoe, which immediately became one of the most coveted sneakers in the world. Also in 2009, Kanye took an unpublicized internship at the gap to learn from the ground up. According to Dazed and Confused magazine, reports from unnamed sources claim that Kanye would work constantly, sometimes staying in the office until midnight in order to understand the fashion world.

Quote, he's learning the fashion business from the inside and trying to do it quietly, unquote. After heading into self-imposed exile following the backlash of the VMAs, Kanye moved to Japan and then to Rome, where he got another internship, this time, with the Italian luxury fashion house Fendi. Kanye was so invested in a career in fashion that he committed to starting at the bottom. He and his friend, then unknown Virgil Ablo, were interns who were paid $500 a month and weren't allowed to do much but watch and learn. Kanye then channeled his time at Fendi into his first catwalk collection at Paris Fashion Week.

And so 2011 seemed to mark a great period of rehabilitation for Kanye. He had overcome the initial agony of losing his mother. He had rekindled his relationship with his big brother Jay-Z. He reclaimed its influence and relevance in the culture, and he had worked his way up from the bottom of a luxury fashion brand. After facing such adversity, even with some of it self-imposed, Kanye seemed to have real positive momentum for the first time in a long time. And then enters Kim Kardashian,

the once unattainable muse of Lost in the World. Since inspiring that poem in 2009, Kim had broken off with Reggie Bush and had started dating NBA player Chris Humphreys. The two actually got married in 2011, but it would only last a couple of months. By early 2012, there were reports that Kim and Kanye had become an item, something that West fueled in April of the same year

when he released a song called Cold from the forthcoming good music compilation, Cruel Summer. Lucky I ain't had Jake dropping from the team. Like familiar. Just two weeks after this song was released, Kim and Kanye stepped out together in New York City for their first public date. Just eight months after that,

Kanye announced at a concert that he and Kim were expecting their first child together. Their first daughter, North, would be born just three days before Yeez's. And less than a year after that, Kanye and Kim would marry. Yeah, there's certain type of people, you know, of course, being in the limelight,

you have to have, you know, a match or like someone that's equally yoked. And it's, you know, it's difficult because there's people that you would date that would try to, you know, date you to maybe be more famous or there's people who will want you to be less famous than you were and, you know, just not accept who you are, you know, in life. And when I would be on the phone with her, you know, even at my, you know, lowest moment, she'd give me energy and remind me of who I was.

and I needed that support, you know, at all times. You know, since my mom passed, it was, you know, very, you know, difficult and hard to find love. It's hard to find for anyone to find love, and especially if you're in a position of being, like, you know, famous or, as they call me now, polarizing. You can hear the clarity Kim gave Kanye, the perspective, the foundation he'd been missing. Kim was the cure. The healing element Kanye prophesied four years earlier when he wrote that poem. Yeah, that I wrote the actual, you're my devil, you're my angel,

you're my heaven, you're my hell, you're my now, you're my forever, you're my freedom, you're my jail. It was her as my muse and me as Shakespeare to write that for, you know, someone who had inspired me, you know, to love, to create, to be an artist. She's my biggest inspiration.

And I was so happy that it worked on that song going, you know, lost in the world. Like, we're not always in the position that we want to be at. We're constantly growing. We're constantly making mistakes. We're constantly trying to express ourselves and trying to actualize our dreams. And, you know, that song was a first step or a second step or third step or a 20th step to the actualization of the family that I have now.

What I said on stage, what I'm saying to you right now is the 25th, 30th step to the actualization of when I'm able to create whatever. I want to create. Just like he did when he fulfilled his dream to become a music star, Kanye here recounts vocalizing his dream as a vital step towards actualizing it years later when he started a family with Kim. And then there at the end, he pivots to explain how he plans to use the same technique to fulfill another as-yet-unrealized dream, creating high-level product. That's because from a distance, it might have seemed like all was going right for Connie West. In just a few years, he had not only recovered from nearly being canceled, but he actually

ascended to greater heights than before, and even started a family with his dream girl. But behind the scenes, in corporate boardrooms and fashion houses around the world, Kanye was being shunned. His first catwalk collection at Paris Fashion Week was horribly reviewed. Despite having the hottest sneaker in the world, the Nike Air Yeezy 2, Nike wouldn't give him a proper long-term contract. Kanye was literally being denied access to high fashion shows that he believed were necessary to joining the industry. Much like how people told him that he never become a rapper. Fashion designers and corporations never seemed to take his clothing and shoe aspiration

seriously. And that created a mountain of frustration for an artist who spent his entire career defying the odds. Kanye, at least in his own mind, was an outsider again, an underdog, right back where he started. You don't realize I am so frustrated. I've got so much I want to give. I've got ideas on color palettes. I've got ideas on silhouettes. And I've got a million people telling me why I can't do it. You know, that I'm not a real designer. I'm not this. I'm not a real rapper either. I'm not a real musician either.

Like, I don't know how to play the piano. Like, I'm an artist. I went to art college. I went to art college and was looked at like I'm soft because I, like, wore, like, Italian clothes. You know what I'm saying? When I'm rapping in front of camera on and my pants is tight, trying to spit a verse for camp. You know, so that's the same when I'm sitting there at a fashion show.

I'm there because I appreciate it. Phoebe Falo. I appreciate Raph Simmons. I appreciate Ricardo Tishi and I look at them as my peers as creative people who dedicate their entire life to making something better for the world. This now classic BBC interview with Zane Lowe in September of 2013 was the first time Kanye made his issues breaking into the fashion industry public. And it was the first time we really understood just how much effort Connie was putting into his creative endeavors outside of music. This wasn't some half-hearted pipe dream. very Kanye West fashion, he was giving it as all.

I've dedicated the past 10 years of my life to this. I've spent 80% of my time working on this and 20% of my time working on music. Why do you think the song Niggas in Paris is called Niggas in Paris? Because Niggas was in Paris. Because I had an office in a small courtyard across the street from Collette where I couldn't even find a good pattern cutter. That's why we were in Paris. I put in the 10,000 hours. People didn't love the Yeeas

the way they did for no reason. Picture this. For me to do the Yeasies and not have a joint venture backing deal with Nike the next day would have been like if I made Jesus walks and was never allowed to make an album.

If Drake was made his first mixtape and was never allowed to be signed. And then people say, why are you mad? This BBC interview spread rapidly across the internet's array of blogs and online media sites. Orkani's more rational explanations of his frustration gained some traction.

It was his more aggressive, viral-ready soundbites that really captured the public's ear. We got this new thing called Classism. It's racism's cousin. This is what we do to hold people back. This is what we do. And we got this other thing that's also been working for a long time where you don't have to be racist anymore. It's called self-hate. It works on itself.

It's like real estate of racism. where just like that, when someone comes up and says something like, I am a God, everybody says, who does he think he is? I just told you who I thought I was. A God. I just told you. That's who I think I am. Would it been better if I had a song that said, I am a nigger?

Or if I had a song to say, I'm a gangster. Or if I had a song to say, I am a pimp. All those colors 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 how could you say that

how could you have that mentality clips like this run from the interview immediately went viral it's hard to imagine that Connie didn't then realize the new power of the internet to amplify his voice and message more than even his lyrics could and so Kanye began doing more and more interviews

on radio and TV shows across the country and an interview after interview, Kanye, in his own words, turned all the way up. I'm standing up and I'm telling you, I am Warhol. I am the number one most impactful artists of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh, Walt Disney, Nike, Google. Now who's going to be the Medici family and stand up and let me create more? Or do you want to marginalize me till I'm out of my moment?

Here on Sway in the morning, Kanye is in the middle of venting his frustration about the fashion industry, about the corporations that wouldn't invest in his creative vision beyond music. Sway then asked Kanye why he doesn't just sidestep the investors and do it himself. Or why don't you empower yourself and don't need them and do it yourself? How, Swa? Take a few steps back to go. You ain't got the answers, man.

You ain't got the answers. You ain't got the answers. You ain't got the answers, Swa. I've been doing this more than you. Doing what more to me? Come on, chill out. You ain't got the answers. You ain't got the answers.

You ain't been doing an education. You ain't been doing an education. You don't have the answers, though. Because you're trying to give me advice about something. You ain't got the answer. You ain't spent $13 million of your own money trying to empower yourself. This piece of internet infamy was just one of many, many, many memorable moments from the media circus at this time. And while outbursts like this one received most of the attention, for those willing to hear Kanye out,

It was pretty obvious that these hurdles were really affecting him. It was almost as if, after years of trying things behind closed doors, leveraging his celebrity and voice publicly was his last resort. It's fine. The list is fine. What I'm trying to say is when you're trying to keep up with the list and write all these wraps, but you're also trying to learn about clothing, you got a whole hood calling you a fag for even liking clothes or being at like the runway shows,

like you can't be a masculine person like Ralph Lauren and still love the beauty and texture of clothing as an artist and still love a fat ass at the same time. You know, then you got America, the president, constantly attacking you. Then you got people overcharge you in all times. Then you got your constant public perception

being brought down. A.G. telling you when you're going to tour and when you can't tour. Everybody got opinion towards you. You got shoes like the Nike's, selling that $80,000 and the head won't even get on the phone with you. You got a meeting where every single door gets closed on you like the Will Smith movie with his son.

It's like that. It's like that for me, for me. Because I'm in that Michael Jackson position where he couldn't get his video played on MTV because he was considered to be urban. This latter comparison to Michael Jackson's fight to get his music videos aired because he was black is something Connie would bring up in multiple interviews. That's because Kanye saw his story. struggle as symptomatic of a larger black struggle to gain equal footing in the highest

positions of America, positions in which black Americans could control their own destiny, creatively, but also financially. Anything I drop, people lining up. And it ain't one black designer that make a suit jacket. It ain't one black designer that makes shoes except for Jason Mayne from Brand Join and he's just left. It ain't, it ain't, we don't got it like that. When I tell you only seven black billionaires, look at that marginalization, and we feel like happy because me and Rick Ross

got a made back or I got a sprint outside of a couple of us or they put a black president man let me tell you something about George Bush and oil money and Obama and no money. Black people don't have the same connection as oil people. You know we don't know nobody that got a nice house. You know we don't

know nobody with paper like that we could go to when we down. You know that could just put us back or put us in a corporation. You know we ain't in a situation. Can you guarantee that your daughter could get a job at this radio station? But if you own this radio station you could guarantee that that's what I'm talking about so why you don't start on the ground level with establishment doors being slammed in his face connie appeared to see himself as something like a vigilante

a superhero of sorts the one guy brave enough to kick down those doors so others could follow his path he was the one guy unwilling to accept the nose he heard his entire life the one guy who believed in himself so much that he was willing to publicly compare himself to walt disney to steve jobs to shakespeare to Jesus himself. Thus, Jesus was born, a romay of Kanye's backbreaking, purifying journey of redeeming a heart full of darkness. An album will begin to examine note by note, line by line.

Next time, dissect. Today's episode was written by Travis Bean, Chris Lambert, and me. Please tell a friend about the new season or share on social media. It really helps. The season intro was scored in sound design by So Wiley. theme music by bureaucratic audio editing by eric bass and me be sure to follow us on social media at dissect podcast and check out our limited season eight merchandise on our website dissectpodcast.com if you want even more episodes on conier listen to season two of dissect a 16 episode analysis

of my beautiful dark twisted fantasy all right i think that's everything talk to you next time