Kanye West interviewed by Steve McQueen, unveils A.P.C menswear collection

Kanye West had a pretty busy weekend. Perhaps not as busy as Drake, who both hosted and performed on SNL, but a busy one nonetheless.

First West unveiled his second menswear collection for French fashion house A.P.C, then he conducted a Q&A with 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen for Interview Magazine. The latter interview focused on a variety of topics, including the rapper’s recent output and some of his most controversial moments.

Here’s some photos of the A.P.C collection via Virgil Abloh’s Instagram, with extracts from the McQueen interview also.

Kanye on Yeezus:

MCQUEEN: Talk to me a little bit about Yeezus. The album before that one, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was a phenomenal success. Did that wear on your mind when you went in to make Yeezus?

WEST: Yeah! So I just had to throw it all in the trash. I had to not follow any of the rules because there was no way to match up to the previous album. Dark Fantasy was the first time you heard that collection of sonic paintings in that way. So I had to completely destroy the landscape and start with a new story. Dark Fantasy was the fifth installment of a collection that included the four albums before it. It’s kind of the “Luke, I am your father” moment. Yeezus, though, was the beginning of me as a new kind of artist. Stepping forward with what I know about architecture, about classicism, about society, about texture, about synesthesia—the ability to see sound—and the way everything is everything and all these things combine, and then starting from scratch with Yeezus … That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want to use the same formula of starting the album with a track like “Blood on the Leaves,” and having that Nina Simone sample up front that would bring everyone in, using postmodern creativity where you kind of lean on something that people are familiar with and comfortable with to get their attention. I actually think the most uncomfortable sound on Yeezus is the sound that the album starts with, which is the new version of what would have been called radio static. It’s the sonic version of what internet static would be—that’s how I would describe that opening. It’s Daft Punk sound. It was just like that moment of being in a restaurant and ripping the tablecloth out from under all the glasses. That’s what “On Sight” does sonically.

MCQUEEN: So Yeezus was about throwing away what people want you to do—the so-called “success”—so you could move on to something else.

WEST: It’s the only way that I can survive. The risk for me would be in not taking one—that’s the only thing that’s really risky for me. I live inside, and I’ve learned how to swim through backlash, or maintain through the current of a negative public opinion and create from that and come through it and spring forth to completely surprise everyone—to satisfy all believers and annihilate all doubters. And at this point, it’s just fun.

On “Bound 2″:

MCQUEEN: I heard about all of this controversy that came to surround , which I had to sort of scratch my head about. I mean, call me silly, but when I saw that video for “Bound 2,” I just thought to myself, “It’s just a video. It’s obviously a sort of romantic video of him and his partner, and it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek.”

WEST: Yeah. I think all that stuff around it is just that: controversy. I think people are afraid of dreams, and that video is one of the closest things to the way that dreams look and feel, or the way joy looks and feels, with the colors. You know, I think there are rules to fashion, with the all-black everything, and rules to art, with white galleries. There are rules to how a lot of things are: the concrete jungle, stone pavement, brick walls. There are even rules to what a Brooklyn apartment looks like. But this video completely didn’t respect any of those rules whatsoever. [laughs] It’s a dream, and I think the controversy comes from the fact that I don’t think most people are comfortable with their own dreams, so it’s hard for them to be comfortable with other people’s dreams. I mean, look, it took some time for us to be comfortable with a walking, talking mouse, but that became an icon. So this stuff, what I’m doing now, is the beginning of me throwing out what it means to be a rapper—you know, with the gold chain …

MCQUEEN: To me, “Bound 2″ looked like a Prince video. Aesthetically, it had that kind of feel. It wouldn’t have looked out of place if it were part of Purple Rain .

WEST: Well, I’d be biased to think that the community of Geminis is the most consistently in tune with what their spirit is telling them to do or why they have breath in their lungs. But I do think that creative Geminis—Tupac, Biggie, Prince, Miles Davis, all being Geminis—have, throughout history, been really in tune with those things. You know, some different friends of mine have been showing me these interviews that Tupac did and how they’re very simple and to the point. I watched them, and one of the things that Tupac kept saying is that he wanted thugs to be recognized. Now Jay-Z is a multi-hundred-millionaire who came from the streets, so Tupac’s mission, in a way, has been realized. But my mission is very different from Tupac’s—and I’m not Tupac. But I think that when I compare myself to Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, or whoever, it’s because I’m trying to give people a little bit of context to the possibilities that are in front of me, as opposed to putting me in the rap category that the Grammys has put me in. In no way do I want to be the next any one of them. But I am the first me. So I only mention those other names to try to give people a little bit of context.

On his “addictive personality”:

MCQUEEN: But there must have been moments of doubt or depression or sadness. I mean, with what happened after the Taylor Swift incident and all the negativity that came your way as the result of that. How did you deal with it all mentally, physically, and spiritually?

WEST: It’s funny that you would say “mentally, physically, spiritually” because my answer before you even said that was going to be “god, sex, and alcohol.”

On visual art:

MCQUEEN: How do you approach the visuals?

WEST: Well, I’m a trained fine artist. I went to art school from the time I was 5 years old. I was, like, a prodigy out of Chicago. I’d been in national competitions from the age of 14. I got three scholarships to art schools—to St. Xavier, to the American Academy of Art, and to the Art Institute of Chicago—and I went to the American Academy of Art. So the joke that I’ve actually played on everyone is that the entire time, I’ve actually just been a fine artist. I just make sonic paintings, and these sonic paintings have led me to become whatever people think of when you say “Kanye West.” Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way. I mean, you know as much as anyone how important the visuals are. So I like to collaborate with different masters—whether it’s George Condo or Nick Knight or Takashi Murakami—on the visuals that are connected to the pieces, and just have a simple high school conversation with whoever I’m working with and bring our thoughts together, but ultimately what we do is through the lens of that collaborator, and it ends up being their final hand. You know, you can go to a bunch of people who say, “Hey, I want to make a video based off of these white-trash T-shirts.” But “Bound 2″ is Nick Knight’s take on those white-trash T-shirts, and if I went to five other artists, they would all do it in other ways. So I think that’s part of the beauty of life. It’s more about the art of conversation, the companionship, the friendships, and the quality of life that you get out of working—it’s about the creative process even more than the final product. I think there’s something kind of depressing about a product being final, because the only time a product is really final is when you’re in a casket.

On striving for perfection:

WEST: My mission is about what I want to create. It’s for people, for humanity. It’s about things that can make the world better. I’m not saying that I’m going to make a better world; I’m just saying that I will provide some things that will help, and my glass ceiling that I’m facing is based on my color. You know, I was looking at some cheesy-ass MTV videos a while ago, and it was so funny because it was like, “Wow, these videos are pre-Michael Jackson”—and people forget that Michael Jackson had to fight to get on MTV because he was considered to be an urban artist. This was, like, the greatest pop star of all time, and they told him, “We’re not gonna play your video because it doesn’t fit our format.”

Read the full McQueen interview here.

[via Pitchfork]