It’s a time-honoured courtesy practised by record companies welcoming American
artists over to these shores. Cleverly placed billboards line the route from
Heathrow to the West End. Their purpose? To massage egos and reassure the
talent that no expense is being spared in the promotion of their music. In
the case of Kanye West, though, unprecedented success calls for gestures of
unprecedented magnitude. Hence the colossal three-dimensional bear’s head
complete with light-up eyes — a replica of the one donned by West on last
year’s The College Dropout debut and its successor Late
Registration — that presides surreally over the rush-hour traffic on
Talgarth Road. It’s just the kind of thing you would do if your artist’s new
album had shifted three million copies in just under a month and you wanted
to welcome him to London.
And yet West, 28, is swift to point out that things could be so much better.
Take, for instance, the impudence of all those journalists who begrudged him
that fifth star in their otherwise positive reviews of his album. “Critics,
they just wanna dole s*** out there, but what makes it a four-star album?”
he begins. “If you really wanted to, couldn’t you find something wrong with
a Marvin Gaye album? It’s made by a human being! I refuse to take the
criticism because it’s a gift to the world. And if it really hurts you that
much, then don’t listen to it. Because the music is a gift, you know?”
In one sense of course, he’s right. Music is a gift. Yet in another sense —
the sense that his new album costs £11.99 from all good record stores — he’s
not right. Which is surely where the reviews come in. If you’re about to
spend money on a CD, then might it not be useful to read what someone has to
say about it? “Not if you download,” says West, without missing a beat. “If
you can’t afford it, download it. Just listen to the music. If nothing else
I’m sure (illegal) downloading probably helps my concert sales.” West’s
reaction seems surprising given that it was the fear of the album leaking
out on to the net that made his record label refuse to send out copies.
But then, perhaps not that surprising. This, after all, is an artist whose
tendency to veer off the script has sent his profile skyrocketing. Before
this interview I’m told by West’s US publicist that the rapper doesn’t want
to discuss the recent telethon in which he sensationally veered off autocue
to lambast the Government’s slow reaction to the havoc wrought by Hurricane
Katrina and declare that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people ”.
Beside him, Mike Myers was on hand to deliver accidentally the funniest
performance of his life — in the words of The Washington Post,
“looking like a guy who stopped on the tarmac to tie his shoe and got hit in
the back by the 8:30 to La Guardia”.
It’s not, continues the PR, that he doesn’t want to talk about it — but these
things leak back to the US press. “If you’re going to bring it up, it’s at
your own risk.” Quite what’s at risk is unclear, but when the matter of
West’s televised outburst comes up, the rapper makes it plain that he has
walked out of interviews in which this has arisen — the subtext being that
he could do the same here. He doesn’t, though.
“The whole thing really is super-controversial over there,” he explains. “It
got censored along the whole of the West Coast.” The reason, he says, that
it slipped out is that studio staff were instructed to activate the
five-second delay in the event of “curse words”. But West didn’t swear. He
wouldn’t be quite so crass as to say it himself, but the negative reaction
from sections of the
US media will serve only to increase West’s standing in the eyes of millions
of black Americans. The Chicago-raised son of an English literature
professor and Black Panther-turned-pastoral counsellor, West lacks the
drug-dealing background that launched 50 Cent and Jay-Z.
Perhaps more important, though, is West’s ability to supply a product that
everyone wants. “In one way, I’m just as much of a hustler.” This is no
understatement. After years spent trying to persuade the Roc-A-Fella label
boss Damon Dash that he could cut it as a rapper, in 2002 West — then a
producer on the label — crashed his Lexus, shattering his jaw. When Dash
came to see him in hospital, West asked for a drum machine. The resulting
track, Through the Wire — which West recorded with his mouth wired
shut — finally persuaded Dash to put his music out.
If The College Dropout had West using his sure pop instinct as a
Trojan horse for a range of topics that his peers wouldn’t touch with a
diamond-encrusted bargepole (religion, education, the complex self-image of
black Americans), Late Registration even features turns from some
of those rappers. On the incendiary Crack Music the Game unleashes
a few lines of hackneyed braggadocio, seemingly unaware that his
contribution is to be placed on a track in which West declares: “Now the
former slaves trade hooks for Grammies/ This dark diction has become
America’s addiction.” Asked if the Game knew what he was contributing to,
West explains that he was interested in using the rapper’s voice merely as
“an instrument”. It’s a typically disingenuous answer from an artist whose
ability to deconstruct his contemporaries makes him no less eager to muscle
in on their audience.
That might also account for his new single. Gold Digger is the latest
in a long line of rap tunes which deal with the subject of the acquisitive
girlfriend. Tell West that this sounds like an artist eager not to alienate
his core fanbase, and he leans forward in a manner that suggests I’ve missed
something obvious. “Gold Digger is outright nigger music. You
know, the average black person doesn ’t really like underground hip-hop.
That’s more of a white thing.”
For rappers such as West, Common and Mos Def, the challenge is to step beyond
“gangsta” rhetoric while retaining a black audience. You know that you’ve
failed, says West, when you have become a “backpack rapper” — a term coined
for artists whose attempts to take hip-hop into more rarefied pastures have
saddled them with a white audience.
Does this explain why, according to reports, four tracks on Late
Registration were shelved after a lukewarm response from a
cross-section of black listeners? West seems bamboozled. “Black people like
all my songs,” he laughs. “How can I make songs that black people don’t
like? I’m black!” I remind him that Late Registration contains one song
based around a sample by Gil Scott-Heron — an artist whose concerts are
almost exclusively attended by well-meaning white audiences. West says he
understands why, but also that he’s aware enough of the pitfalls to avoid it
happening to him. To make sure, he adds: “I hate music where white people
are trying to sound black. The white music I like is white. I like Franz
Ferdinand. That ’s the s***.” As for his own s***: “Everyone likes it!”
Late Registration is out now on Mercury.
