Kanye in Vibe

Kanye's interview in this month's Vibe is great. Below are two great excerps. He hadn't been ranting like this since his Rolling Stone article (one with him on the cover with crown of thorns).

“I made a decision. I wanna make popular music, but I want less fans... I want the freedom of having less fans. It’s like the freedom of having less money. If you have less money, you have less responsibility. It’s like Björk. If she wanted to pose naked, you’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s Björk.’ But if I wanted to pose naked, people would draw all type of things into it. I definitely feel like, in the next however many years, if I work out for two months, that I’ll pose naked. I break every rule and mentality of hip-hop, of black culture, of American culture.”

I'm for it. Not the naked part, but the fact that he's down to dedicate his rep and rest of his career toward blurring the lines between pop and indie music, although with the advent of blogs and whatnot, there's really no such thing as indie any more, right?

On 808s: "I could have put it out as a mixtape. I always wanted to do a mixtape called T-Pain Style. And I was like, if these songs are good as hell, why not put it out as a real album? And who's to say what's a mixtape, what's an album. I ain't have to drop an album either. What I do at this point is a gift. And I think people are complaining about their gift. They can either play with it or not! But don't complain to me about the gift. There's guys out there, nobody spoke on our behalf before. Whatever about the singing. Fuck all the singing, fuck all the auto-tune, fuck the 'he's a rapper, he's not a rapper', 'he's going through something', 'he has to get this out of his system', 'he's crazy'. Fuck all that. It's men out there who have never had anyone to speak on their behalf about the way they feel in a relationship. We don't feel like, 'Fuck you, bitch, I'm going to fuck a whole bunch of girls'. NO! We feel hurt. We feel pain. Like, 'Damn, why would you say something like that to me? Damn, I LOVE YOU. Damn, I want to have a family. Damn, I want to find someone to raise my kids. Damn, my baby mama's a bitch. Or she's not a bitch'. That more than anything-more than the way I wanted to deliver this art-is the message behind 808's."

Fuck auto-tune. And fuck his live performances- they were all horrible. But dude really expects to put out an album like this and sell 3 million copies and not expect some bad reviews?