He’s also the guy who, after a near-fatal car crash in 2002, turned the experience into a song called “Through the Wire,” which he rapped while still recovering from the accident, audibly struggling to spit out rhymes with his jaw wired shut. Lest we forget that before he was a pop-star polymath, he was an in-demand producer whose aspirations to become a rapper in his own right were thoroughly and consistently dismissed by the very people who were profiting from his skills as a songwriter and beat-maker. But some of it seems to emanate from some deeper, less performative place for West. He’s the guy who, in front of the large fabricated-mountain set on his recent “Yeezus” tour, has alternately taken aim at Hedi Slimane, Bernard Arnault, François-Henri Pinault, and Nike likened himself to Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and Michelangelo embarked on a long and winding monologue about Lenny Kravitz (at which Kravitz was present) and asked Google head Eric Schmidt to invest in his design firm Donda (named after West’s late mother)-all while still retaining the level-eyed insight to hold Le Corbusier and Q-Tip as inhabitors of similarly lofty creative planes.Ī lot of it, of course, is just old-fashioned “I’m the Alpha with no Omega” hip-hop theater. After all, he’s the guy who, during an NBC telethon to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina, proclaimed, off script, that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” He’s the guy who stormed the stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and announced that his good friend Jay-Z’s significant other, Beyoncé, should have won the prize just bestowed upon the perpetually in faux-awe Taylor Swift.

What’s there left to say about Kanye West? Certainly, West himself would have plenty to say. And people are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice. It’s the beginning of me rattling the cage, of making some people nervous.

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