Kanye West: I Was Thinking Of Not Rapping Again, I Rapped For The Devil For So Long – Jesus Altered My Ego

Kanye West

Kanye West: I Was Thinking Of Not Rapping Again, I Rapped For The Devil For So Long… Jesus Altered My Ego

Love him or hate him, Kanye West is one of the most talked about figures of our time. Whether it’s his chart-topping hits, his bold statements on Christianity, his fashion sense, or his controversial stances on politics – the 42-year-old is never without buzzworthy content. He talks about all this and more in his most recent interview with GQ.

Kanye West revealed how he was coping with Kobe Bryant‘s death just days after his fatal helicopter accident:

“Not good…Kobe was one of my best friends.”

On contemplating quitting his rap career:

“I was thinking of not rapping again, because I rapped for the devil so long that I didn’t even know how to rap for God. Then one of my pastors told me, ‘My son just said that he would want a rap album about Jesus from Kanye West.’ He didn’t say, ‘Kanye West, you should do this,’ or ‘you need to do this.’ He just told me something that a child said. And that one thing made the difference.”

Kanye West

He occasionally records albums on his iPhone:

“I just rap into my iPhone. Best microphone on the planet. Thirty, forty percent of The College Dropout was recorded on a [Roland] VS-1680. Twenty percent of ‘Jesus Is King’ was recorded on an iPhone.”

On ego, and his refusal to compromise:

“Yeah, I feel like there’s a job to be unwilling to make compromise. I like when people don’t have to compromise themselves to collaborate. Even as an artist, or as a composer, I compose the strongest talents and push them to be the maximum version of their superhero. People spend one day with me and they’re thinking about their own ideas outside of the box. If people spend years, they should be able to make it to the Super Bowl. To have blind faith is the ultimate confidence. Sometimes it could have felt like it was arrogant. And I think that the arrogance could have come from the fact that I wasn’t working for God, but I was working for my ego, which is like working for the devil…I feel like this conversation that we’re having, I’m not having to use ego, because everything is defined. We’re on a piece of the 12,000 acres that I own in Wyoming. It’s different than me being inside a photography studio where previous to that there was somebody posing in their underwear, after that there’s somebody showing a backpack. There’s already a comfortability here, and then we’ve known each other for a long time, and then a lot of what sounded crazy or ambitious at a certain point has already been proven.”

Kanye West hosts Sunday Service at Houston jail

Kanye West previews a bar from his upcoming album while revealing the one word he bars people from using in reference to him:

“The word ambitious is not allowed to be used around me. Kanye West is nothing if not ambitious. Because ambition, when I hear it, it says that it seems like it’s almost impossible…it’s got far-fetched tucked into it. You would be amongst 100 or 200 people on the planet who are like the least racist white person possible. But it’s something about the word ambitious that makes me feel like I’m young Venus Williams doing the TV interview when her dad had to come and defend her. If you say, ‘Yo, it’s ambitious,’ I need Venus and Serena Williams’s dad to run up and say, ‘How you going to say it’s ambitious? He said he was going to do it!’ Have I ever not done anything I said I was going to do? ‘I made it back from addiction, I beat the predictions, brought real to the fictions’—that’s off the new album.”

On his rebirth as a Christian:

“I’m definitely born again…I surrounded myself with the healing—the highest-level healing possible: singing about Jesus with my friends and family surrounding me [at Sunday Service] every single week. This was a place, contrary to popular belief about Christianity, of no judgment. I feel that the church that most people grew up on as kids had a negative environment. The greatest thing for me, as someone who’s given their life to Christ, is knowing that other people have that as an anchor and a form of healing, because you’re talking to a person that went to the hospital and back. Now you see the measured nature—being able to let the child take the driver’s seat but still be measured. When you’re not in service to God, you can end up being in service to everything else. To live inside of sin, it’s going to cost you more than you can pay. You don’t want to continue to sin with no repentance. I understand that people feel that I’ve made some cultural sins. But the only real sins are the sins against God, and you don’t want to continue to sin against God.”

He continues:

“I feel that we all have sin, and when certain sins are worn more on our sleeves, it’s easier for Christians who are not Christ, but are human beings, to be able to channel judgment at what they see in front of them. The other thing is, if anyone claims to be Christian, they’re accepting accountability to other Christians. But people don’t realize that Christians are loud. That we have a right to righteous anger. That Jesus flipped tables. They think that all of a sudden you believe in Christ, so we’re not even supposed to speak up. And if we speak up, people will say, ‘Oh, you’re being judgmental.’ And it’s like, Oh, now, because I’m Christian, I don’t even have an opinion any more? I’m Christian and I still have an opinion. But my opinion is based on the Word…I’m expressing my personal relationship with Christ. When I was not owning up to the maximum of who I could be as a dad and the maximum of who I could be as a husband, that kind of behavior, that kind of mentality, landed me in a place where I needed to be medicated…people could say, ‘What about these things that men have done with the word of Christ that were bad and, let’s say, over-institutionalized?’ And I’m saying: That’s not going to stop my love for Christ. I’m going to keep on expressing what God has done for my life.”

On his alter ego:

“I definitely think there’s an alter ego. And definitely Christ altered my ego.”

Kanye clarifies what happened to his Star Wars-inspired housing properties in Calabassas:

“A big misconception is that the city made me tear down the domes. We were only making them to experience the proportion and fully planned to tear them down. Like all of California, they got in front of the story. To say, ‘Oh, we took Kanye and tore down his domes.’ And you know, metaphorically, that’s what people have been trying to do since I was little. But as we can see now, they have not succeeded.”

Kanye West

On his controversial support of Donald Trump:

“Both my parents were freedom fighters, and they used to drink from fountains they were told they couldn’t drink from, and they used to sit in restaurants where they were told they couldn’t eat from. They didn’t fight for me to be told by white people which white person I can vote on.”

He reveals how he feels about his infamous “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” statement 15 years later:

“‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ is a victim statement. This white person didn’t do something for us. That is stemmed in victim mentality. Every day I have to look in the mirror like I’m Robert De Niro and tell myself, ‘You are not a slave.’ As outspoken as I am, and the position that I am in, I need to tell myself.”

Despite not voting in the last election, he’ll be voting for Trump this term:

“…I’m definitely voting this time. And we know who I’m voting on. And I’m not going to be told by the people around me and the people that have their agenda that my career is going to be over. Because guess what: I’m still here! ‘Jesus Is King’ was No. 1! I was told my career would end if I wasn’t with her. What kind of campaign is that, anyway? That’s like if Obama’s campaign was ‘I’m with Black.’ What’s the point of being a celebrity if you can’t have an opinion? Everybody make their own opinion! Black people are controlled by emotions through the media. The media puts musicians, artists, celebrities, actors in a position to be the face of the race, that really don’t have any power and really are just working for white people. When it’s said like that, it’s kind of obvious, right? We emotionally connect to someone of our color on TV and feel that this person is speaking for us. So let me say this: I am the founder of a $4 billion organization, one of the most Google-searched brands on the planet, and I will not be told who I’m gonna vote on because of my color.”

Kanye West

He ended with his take on his influence:

“I’m just focusing on myself…I think artists are so concerned with perfectionism. All these people say Dark Fantasy was this album that was so good, and then people didn’t like 808s, they didn’t like Yeezus. Dark Fantasy, I just made it to that level because people were saying my career was going to be over. I always felt like ‘Power’ was my weakest first single that I ever had, because I felt like it was bowing to the expectations…You get into a position and you become influential, and that becomes more of your goal rather than following your spirit and your anointing. So look, I’m not telling anybody who they should vote on, what they should wear, where they should live. I’m doing me. If you just so happen to catch a photograph of me doing me, that’s what I was doing! I’m not doing nobody else in the photograph.”

Written by Miata Shanay