Culturebox: Kanye West Has a Goblet

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culturebox Kanye West Has a Goblet An all-access, totally non-exclusive interview with the would-be king of hip-hop. By Jonah Weiner Posted Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2010, at 7:08 AM ET "Fur pillows are hard to actually sleep on," Kanye West tells me. It's just before noon on an overcast Sunday in late July, and West has invited me into his Manhattan apartment. Three years ago, the rapper hired an interior designer to renovate the place into a stark configuration of right angles and polished stone surfaces. But these days, West's aesthetic has taken a turn for the maximal. "Versailles is the shit," he says. He's in the process, as he puts it, of "turning the crib real Kingish." The pillows are part of the plan. Interviews with Kanye West have become increasingly rare over the past few years. For a time, the Chicago rapper was unavoidable--on the cover of Time in a blazer and jeans, on the cover of Rolling Stone in a crown of thorns--but the late 2007 death of his mother Donda knocked him off the radar. There are only a small handful of print interviews West has given since her passing.* His silence was presumably--at least in part--a function of grief, but West has also communicated his general ambivalence about journalists. "This is my problem with interviews, you know? What if you did music, and someone else could come in and change your words around and then release it to the radio? And you ain't even get a chance to listen to it before they dropped it to radio? That's how interviews are! You say what you say and then you get paraphrased," he's said. "I wanna get approval over the shit." To continue reading, click here. Jonah Weiner is a pop critic for Slate. Follow him on Twitter. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate The Ridiculous Ruling That Overturned Obama's Stem-Cell Policy--and Bush's Why Google Wave Failed and What It Means for the Company The Economic Knife Fight That's Broken Out Over the True Cause of Unemployment	Advertisement
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