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VERY HOT! KING Magazine article on Kanye West

Can’t Tell Him Nothin’
Kanye West is a risk taker, rule breaker, trailblazer and the only rapper who is bigger than hip-hop

“But he’s a rapper.” Do you know how many people have been dismissed with that one sentence? No matter how much wealth Jay-Z accrues, how many Richard Princes he buys, how many Beyoncés he marries, those words will almost certainly precede him for the rest of his life. Even Diddy, who has come closest to penetrating other spaces—fashion, Hamptons society, Broadway, Hollywood—is still, in the eyes of many, a hip-hop interloper. It’s taken Kanye West to break the cycle.

Of hip-hop but not defined by it, Kanye is the exception to every one of the genre’s rules. He challenges its expectations from within and recalibrates how outsiders view it. He is both local and foreign. He exerts his own gravitational pull. Even though last year’s 808s & Heartbreak, his fourth album, will likely be the lowest selling of his career, it will mark something far more important: the moment that hip-hop began to mint stars bigger than itself.

For any other artist, the album would have been a failure, with its uncomfortably blunt lyrics, which are mostly sung (and poorly at that), and its often inarticulate production. It’s sometimes hard to remember that just five years ago, Kanye was a rap formalist, a producer known best for chopping and speeding up soul samples and, sometimes, awkwardly rapping over them. And yet, despite that, this new move didn’t seem so odd. In a world where egotism is the prime currency, Kanye has been a special case from the start, and releasing 808s felt like just another act of emotional and creative hubris.

Really, though, it was something more. First there were the circumstances: Both the death of his mother and the split from his fiancée left Kanye untethered. And so instead of planning for Good-Ass Job, the album that was to continue the life arc he’d set out on his first three albums, he knocked off to Hawaii for a few weeks with Kid Cudi, Mr. Hudson, Plain Pat, Don C and a couple of friends to put together 808s, a minor opus of depression and petulance.

And once it was done, he kept fighting the grain. Process? What process? He leaked some songs himself. (Some others snuck out too.) He tweaked the font. He changed the release date. And then, into the teeth of a recession, he just dropped the damn thing. No proclamations as to its greatness or its inevitability. Just a guy with an itch to scratch.

For an artist of his stature, this is a new model, one that prioritizes smallness, instinct, portability, urgency. All Def Jam could rightly do was get on board and get out of the way. Kanye used the label much as an independent artist uses a distributor: as a hired hand. The major-label system is increasingly unreliable, as is the major-label way of doing business. And so, instead of shooting for the blockbuster—Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III may well be the last rap blockbuster for some time—he went with the diary entry. The same week, Guns N’ Roses released its decade-plus-in-the-making comeback, Chinese Democracy, which sold half as much as Kanye, then promptly evaporated.

Kanye knows what their long-cocooned lead singer, W. Axl Rose, couldn’t possibly understand: There is only the now. So he didn’t release a rap album—big deal. He’ll go back to it when he feels like it. Choosing to forgo rap was but one of several idiosyncratic choices Kanye made last year. He blogged about his obsessions—Japanese streetwear, barely clothed models, mid-century furniture, big boats—and about how he was portrayed in the media. He expressed interest in interning with a fashion company so he could learn that business from the inside out. He tussled with paparazzi. He wore suspenders.

Kanye’s freedom is predicated upon the fact that he’s less established in, and therefore less beholden to, hip-hop and its mores. Still, people, even those with less complicated loyalties, follow his lead. Lil Wayne wearing tight jeans? That’s a Kanye move. Hipster rap? Blame ’Ye. Flagging sales for 50 Cent? Absolutely, in part, attributable to West and his influence.

Kanye gives people permission to be something other than what they’re generally asked to be. It’s not because he makes it seem easy but because he makes it seem inevitable. And because of him, the list KING comes up with when we’re looking forward from our 100th issue will be nothing like this one.

— Jon Caramanica