MUSIC:Kanye West, the Chicago rapper with an ego the size of Illinois and sales figures that dwarf the Sears Tower, tells Brian Boydabout his Black Panther dad, Obama's victory, why Shrekis his favourite film … and, yes, his album, his fashion business and his burger joint
IN A hot and airless Dublin hotel room, Kanye West sits down beside me and looks warily at the "full Irish breakfast" on his plate. He glares at the glass of freshly squeezed orange juice as if it's radioactive material, pushes it firmly out of view and conjures up a can of 7-Up instead.
He gives a little introductory speech to his new album, 808s and Heartbreak, before taking a brick-sized iPod out of his pocket and placing it in a docking station. As the album plays, he negotiates his "full Irish" - all the time keeping a suspicious eye on a piece of black pudding, which goes untouched. At regular intervals, he puts down his knife and fork to do a still-seated dance to the sounds coming from the iPod - he also breaks into enthusiastic bouts of "air keyboard" and "air percussion". It's all a bit surreal.
By a country mile, West is the most interesting hip-hop artist in the world today. It is not an overestimation to regard his second album, Late Registration(which contained Touch The Sky, Gold Diggerand Diamonds From Sierra Leone) as rap's White Album.
He's an extravagantly talented artist - and he knows it. Modesty is not his strong suit. In 2006, when he lost out on a MTV award, he interrupted the winners while they were making their speech, taking the mic to shout out "this award should have gone to me". Earlier that year, he had posed as Jesus Christ on the cover of Rolling Stonemagazine. And not in an ironic way.
Other times he makes better use of his public profile. In 2005, he deviated from a speech he was giving at a Hurricane Katrina benefit to say on live TV that "George Bush doesn't care about black people".
He has spoken out about the rampant homophobia in the rap world and - no doubt influenced by his ex-Black Panther father - he once sang about the theory that Ronald Reagan intentionally placed crack cocaine in US ghettoes to kill off Black Panther leaders.
There are only two things he doesn't particularly want to talk about today: the death of his mother (also his manager) a year ago this week, after a plastic surgery operation that went tragically wrong, and the recent end of his 18-month engagement to the designer Alexis Phifer. Everything is on the new album, though: 10 of the 11 tracks are about his break-up with Phifer, one is about his mother.
One other proviso: "If you ask me which I prefer, producing or singing, I will walk straight out of this room." He smiles as he says this. Or at least, his mouth is smiling; his eyes aren't.
"THIS ISN'T A HIP-HOP RECORD. I SING ON ALL THE SONGS. I WANTED A POP ALBUM"
• A distinguishing characteristic of 808s and Heartbreakis the use of the studio software package Auto-Tune. Auto-Tune, used now in most chart hits, gives an artificial sheen to the voice and makes the vocal sound distorted or even robotic-like. It's most widely known use is on the 1998 Cher hit Believe.
"I've called the album 808s and Heartbreakbecause all the drums on it are produced by the Roland TR-808, which now is a very unfashionable drum machine, but I love the sound you get from it — all the drumming comes out very tribal. The 808 was really big in the 1980s and in the early days of hip-hop."
"The other thing I've done is that all my vocals are with Auto-Tune. A lot of the time in hip-hop music you get samples used from the 1960s or 1970s and the voice is always a bit off-pitch. Auto-Tune gives you perfect pitch. I really wanted to use it because this isn't a hip-hop record - I'm singing on all the songs. I know Auto-Tune is really popular now in pop music and lot of people think it's really wack for a singer to use it, but I wanted to make a pop album.
"I'm already bracing myself for the fact that all people are going to be talking about when the album comes out is Auto-Tune. But I've done something innovative and cutting-edge here so I'll just have to accept it."
"THE MUSIC THAT EXCITED ME GROWING UP WAS BOY GEORGE, MICHAEL JACKSON, PHIL COLLINS"
• Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, West has always talked up his "uncool" pop music preferences. But you do get the impression that, having conquered hip-hop, he might be after Michael Jackson's king-of-pop crown.
"I don't know what hip-hop's problem with pop music is: pop has given us the best musical moments ever. The Beatles were pop. I wanted to use my position as the biggest hip-hop artist around to make a statement on this record. You know, hip-hop now is the most cred thing you can do. And I'm a black guy, and I'm from Chicago, so I have a lot of cred stuff going on for me, but at every step I like to stand back and just get people to open their minds up.
"With fashion, I said, through what I was wearing, that is ok to dress stylishly again. I also said that people shouldn't bash gay people - that we need to be respectful of gay people. And now I want to say: "It's ok to like pop music."
"As little kids, we all listened to pop music - when and why did it become a bad thing? With this album, I've invented a new genre called 'Pop Art', which is not to be confused with the visual art movement. I think I'm producing pop, but in an artistic way.
"To do a pop album I went back and had to think about the pop music that really excited me when I was growing up. Do you know who it was? You'll never guess. It was Boy George and Madonna and Michael Jackson and Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins."
"THE BIGGEST SELLING MOVIE IN ANY GIVEN YEAR IS ALSO MY FAVOURITE MOVIE OF THE YEAR"
• Some musicians like to reference obscure cinematic and literary works - either in lyrics or in interviews. West believes the cultural mainstream is where he truly belongs.
"I am a huge fan of popular culture. I love Walt Disney. Here's all you need to know about my tastes: whatever is the biggest selling movie in any given year is also my favourite movie of the year.
"I loved Shrek. It was a masterpiece. It was art; the drawing was amazing, especially the techniques they used. They really pushed the boundaries there. There is a belief, I think, in society at large and a lot of the time in the hip-hop world, that something popular is necessarily bullshit. There's a real snobbery there. I think that people who think like that are just jealous that they can't create something popular - so they look down on it.
"I remember back at school, the jocks there used to really hate me because I was able to dance. I was also able to play basketball - not as well as them - but they couldn't understand that I could be a guy who could dance and who also could play basketball.
"You get this sort of snobbery also from all those indie guitar bands who look down on pop music. My question to them is: 'Do you not get excited when a song of yours explodes and everyone is listening to it?' Basically what I'm saying is: if you don't like Britney Spears, then you are wrong."
"WHEN I RAP ABOUT SOMETHING POLITICAL, IT'S MY PARENTS COMING THROUGH, NOT ME"
• Active in the 1960s and 1970s, The Black Panthers were a black US political grouping who promoted the concept of "black power" and agitated for better representation of black people in US political and civil life. There were sporadic incidents of violent behaviour but the movement is perhaps best remembered for its "radical chic" image and how enamoured the white liberal intelligentsia were of them. West's father, Ray West, was a member of the group. He now works as a Christian counsellor.
"I am not into politics. I'm more into fashion. When I wrote Crack Music[about the allegation that Ronald Reagan's administration introduced crack-cocaine into black ghettoes to curb political activism], I was expressing what I felt and what I had studied at that point. I can't go too much further into that.
"Whenever you hear me rapping about something political it's my parents coming through, not me. All that political stuff and all the stuff about society comes from my father. Growing up I was only interested in clothes and movies and music. I do remember, though, my father driving me around and he would beat me around the head with all this politics and society stuff. For me, though, my father was a photographer. And he used to teach medical illustration at school.
"That's how I remember him as a child. We used to have all this graph paper back in the crib and he would sit there and design his ideal house. I used to copy him and design my own ideal house - mine would always have an indoor basketball court in the living room."
"I ONLY HAVE TWO PASSIONS AND TWO GOALS IN LIFE: MUSIC AND CLOTHES"
• Hip-hop has always been more than just the music. Early pioneers such as the Wu-Tang Clan put as much effort into their "lifestyle" clothing range (Wu-Wear) as into their recording career. It was an idea taken to a multi-million dollar conclusion by P Diddy whose Sean John clothing line now makes more money than his albums.
Says Kanye: "I have this burger restaurant in Chicago called Fatburger. It's like really good food - but still diner food. There's going to be a chain of them. It really doesn't take much time because my business partner does most of the work.
"There was also supposed to be a TV show about me with Larry David (writer of Seinfeld and director and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm), but I think HBO was going through a lot of stuff when we gave it to them and it didn't get picked up.
"My huge passion now is my clothing line, called Past Tell, which I'm putting all my time into and will be available sometime next year. It's going to be American sports wear, but with Japanese edge. I've set so many fashion trends over the past five years and I want to do it full-time now.
"It will be a mix of Marc Jacobs, Polo and American Apparel. I just need people around me who can produce the stuff. I want to be able to say to someone: 'I want a suit that looks like Raf Simons', and be able to get one done up.
"With the clothing line, I'm really influenced by what the Wu Tang Clan did back in the 1990s. If you could see my room now - I've magazines stacked up to the ceiling and I keep ripping out pages for ideas. The clothing line is an idea from my heart. I only have two passions and two goals in life: music and clothes.
• 808s and Heartbreakis released next Friday. See www.kanyeuniversecity.com
Bigger than the Beatles
Rap music is known for its big egos, but Kanye West takes self-belief to a new level.
"There's a song on the album called Heartless, which I really love and is going to be the next single - we've already shot the video for it.
"When I have a song I love I really want people to hear it and last week I was at the MTV Europe Awards in Liverpool last week, and Paul McCartney was there. He got up to go and I just kept thinking "he has to hear my song" and I went over to him and I was going: "I know you're Paul McCartney and everything and you used to be in The Beatles but I'd love you to hear my new song. I had to stop him leaving the room. That's what I'm like."
The rapper and the president
A vocal supporter of Barack Obama during his campaign, Kanye West was put out that the promo schedule for his new album meant he was travelling on a plane to Europe when the news broke about Obama's election victory.
"It's just the most unbelievable thing I've ever heard," he says. "I heard on the plane and then we got it confirmed the moment we landed. I was trying everything in the days beforehand to switch flights and work things so I could have made it back to Chicago that night to take part in the celebrations but logistically it just wasn't going to happen."
After Obama's victory, West posted a photo of the president-elect on his blog with the headline: "HI MOM, OBAMA WON!" (West's mother Donda died last November.)
During his campaign, Obama had said that he planned to use rappers Kanye West and Jay-Z to educate the US public and bridge the generation gap if elected.
"I've met with Jay-Z. I've met with Kanye. And I've talked to other artists about how potentially to bridge that gap."
It's reminiscent of the time Tony Blair invited Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn (who refused the invitation) to 10 Downing Street shortly after his election to discuss "music and youth" issues.
That ended in tears. Whether Obama makes good on his election promise remains to be seen.
Shortly before the election West teamed up with Jay-Z to work on a song called We Made History(which references Obama's campaign) which will be on the new Jay-Z album.
The song can also be found through Kanye West's blog at www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/ (see November 9th entry).
Though we asked West about the Obama victory and its implications for the US and for the two men's home city of Chicago, he had little to say on the matter, other than: "I still find it unbelievable."
It's hard not to think that the musician's ultimate view on Obama may be that the election only distracted Americans from a far more important event: the release of Kanye West's new album.
