Today BBC1 Radio aired the second installment of its interview with Kanye West, wherein the rap all-star and design/decor aficionado went on about his design aspirations and his desire to be "the anchor for the first trillion dollar company." He even went so far as to say the sort of strangled overtones of his latest album, Yeezus, were a direct result of the frustration he felt struggling to break into other creative industries. The interview is only halfway over (the station is releasing his chat with radio DJ Zane Lowe in four parts, one part every day), but there's still much designbabble to glean, so here now are West's 14 best design-centric lines plucked straight from the interview:
14. "If you're an architect, if you're a world-builder, if you have all these ideas and you're [Antoni] Gaudí and you want to build buildings—if you don't ever get that out, what's going to happen?"
13. "I want to do product. I am a product person. Not just clothing but water bottle design, architecture, everything that you could think about."
12. On inspiration for Yeezus: "It's just the way I was consuming information in my life at that time ... Just going to the Louvre and, you know, going to furniture exhibits and understanding that. Trying to open and do interviews like this. Learning more about architecture."
11. "I've been at it for 10 years, and I look around and say 'wait a minute, there's no one around here in this space that looks like me. And if there are, they're quiet as fuck.' ... So that means now we're seriously in a civil rights movement."
10. "Me and Virgil [Abloh] are in Rome, giving designs to Fendi, over and over, and getting our designs knocked down ? [We] brought the leather jogging pants six years ago to Fendi, and they said 'no.' How many motherfuckers you done seen with a leather jogging pant?"
9. "The reason why I related that to design, and what we do in design, is saying that's the music that us creatives that want to get into design ... this is our soundtrack to creativity."
8. "I'm going to do dope things."
7. "When I see Hedi Slimane, and it's all like, okay, this is my take on the world. Yeah, he's got some nice $5,000 jeans in there. It's some nice ones here and there, some good shit here and there. But we culture. Rap the new rock and roll. We culture. Rap is the new rock and roll. We the rock stars."
6. "What I want to explain to everybody out there is, like, I make music. I can do it but I shouldn't be limited to one place of creativity. And it's literally like only one or two or three reasons why I haven't been able to break that down."
5. "You guys don't understand that I did the Yeezus (sneaker) and they eBay'd for $90,000. And people wanted them bad as whatever, right? But I didn't get a call from Nike the next day."
4. On the nature of his frustration: "As a creative, for you to have done something to the level of the Yeezus and not be able to create more, and you cannot create that on your own, with no support with no backing."
3. "We can make t-shirts ? but anything else, your Truman Show boat is hitting the wall."
2. "I want to be the force, the anchor for a billion dollar company. ? I want to be the anchor for the first trillion dollar company."
1. On his attempts to get into fashion: "I've dedicated the last 10 years of my life to this. I've spent 80 percent of my time working on this, and 20 percent working on music. Why do you think the song 'Niggas in Paris' was called 'Niggas in Paris'? Because niggas was in Paris! That's why we were in Paris. I put in the 10,000 hours."
· Kanye Lowe. Zane Lowe. Part 2 [BBC Radio]
· All Kanye West coverage [Curbed National]
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