Kanye West admits Drake is the most popular rapper

Kanye West covers the August issue of GQ magazine next month where drops hints about a new album.

The rapper also discusses the process behind making Yeezus, his nuptials to Kim Kardashian, and racial politics in America. As usual, Kanye isn’t short of some great quotes….but you have to cut through the headline-grabbing statements to get to the real gems.

Here are some highlights from his chat with Zach Baron:

On new album

I hope I can get one of these songs out in the next couple of weeks, just to have something up and running. But I think most likely September. I go back and forth. Like, should it be September or should it be October? Should it be November? When Beyoncé was working on her last album, she took a while. I was thinking it could somehow come out in June, like Yeezus, and just kill it for the summer. But then I’m like, I have to work on Adidas and be with my child.

“But now, for the new album, one new thing could change everything. I had an idea of the way I wanted to do the album. And then I got a new song that’s so good that the album has to be balanced against it. This song is a song that can be in the club like “Don’t Like” or “Niggas in Paris.” Whereas before I was working on the album and I had these beautiful songs, they were just more songs. They weren’t saying, “Okay, tuck your whole summer in.” They were just saying, “Hey, I’m a great musician, I make these beautiful songs, and they have all this meaning, and nobody can make anything that means this much.”

On Yeezus, a year later

I think ‘Yeezus’ is the beginning of a completely new era of music. It was all new rules. It just broke every rule possible. None of the ideas were popular ideas. New Slaves. The second verse. I argue that it’s the best rap verse of all time. It’s the ‘Coming to America’ or ‘Anchorman’ of a verse. You know, it’s got the funny shit. It’s got the antagonization. It’s got patterns. It’s got social and political consciousness. It’s got struggle. It’s got bravado. It’s everything that a rap verse is supposed to be.

I worked on [my verses] for like eight months!… I think [Rick Rubin] needs to clarify that to people — that I didn’t make it up in that time. I just said them in that time.

On new single, “All Day”

Even lyrically, I think about certain lines that I say on my new single, which is called “All Day,” that usually Jay would say, but Jay’s not on there. So I say, “All day, nigga, it’s Ye, nigga. Shopping for the winter, it’s just May, nigga. Ball so hard, man, this shit cray, nigga. You ain’t getting money unless you got eight figures.” Right? Jay would have said that.

On Drake

Yeah. He got last summer. And I’d never given it up till last summer.” Now he’s thinking about taking it back. “It’s a real question for me. Do I want to?

On why he decided to get married and why his and Kim Kardashian’s marriage is so inspirational

Saying “Hey, I like Kim” isn’t as inspiring to people as us getting married. And anyone that’s in a relationship knows that in order to get to the point to get married and then to be married and to then carry on, it needs that work put into it. Right now, people look at it and it’s like, “Wow, that’s inspiring.” Meaning that love is infectious. You know, God is infectious—God flowing through us and us being little-baby creators and shit. But His energy and His love and what He wants us to have as people and the way He wants us to love each other, that is infectious. Like they said in Step Brothers: Never lose your dinosaur. This is the ultimate example of a person never losing his dinosaur. Meaning that even as I grew in cultural awareness and respect and was put higher in the class system in some way for being this musician, I never lost my dinosaur.

Kim is this girl who fucking turns me on. I love her. This is who I want to be next to and be around. And then people would try to say, “Well, you know, if you’re a musician, you should be with a musician, and if you want to design, you need to be with a girl from the design world.” I don’t give a fuck about people’s opinions. Because when a kid falls in love with an airplane or a bike or a dinosaur—especially if you’re an only child and it’s not because of the book that the sibling was reading—it’s like, fuck, you mean to tell me that the dinosaurs walked the earth and stuff like that?! That’s amazing! You mean to tell me that these giant multi-ton crafts can fly that fast and that loud, and they can flip, and there’s danger, the possibility of them exploding? That’s fucking cool! You mean to tell me that this girl with this fucking body and this face is also into style, and she’s a nice person, and she has her own money and is family-oriented? That’s just as cool as a fucking fighter jet or dinosaur! And just as rarely seen.

On voluntarily marrying into a celebrity family, yet having issues with “celebrity”

In the speech, I talked about the idea of collaboration and all the people involved working together and being able to change things. Meaning there was a time for two or three years where fashion designers wouldn’t give Kim dresses. There was a time they wouldn’t even let me be at shows. Now the idea that Kim is in a Givenchy Couture dress is raising the communication. Because people would be more apt to be like, “Celebrities don’t really have style. Celebrities can’t dress. Celebrities are less educated.” But they haven’t had the chance to be able to break through and have Carine Roitfeld sitting right there.

Carine Roitfeld is the Walt Disney of what Tumblr is today. She is the Kanye West of what Tumblr is today. She’s the single most important person to what street style is today. And she was at the wedding seven seats down from Kim, who is one of the number one fashion plates of today. So I said, “Wow, Carine is seven seats down from Kim. Farnaz [Farjam], the producer of the Kardashians and the producer of The Real World, is four seats down from [director] Steve McQueen. And four seats, because in between them is Hosain [Rahman] from Jawbone.” This is what I talked about. That was not a forty-five-minute speech to myself. Do you realize what that means for those people to be in that close of a proximity to each other?

On the rumors behind why Jay Z and Beyonce didn’t show up to his wedding

All that, I wouldn’t even speak on. It doesn’t even matter to me whatsoever, who would show up. Because the most important person to show up there, to me, was Kim. And that’s all that matters to me. I had to fight for that for seven years. But the fact that these other people showed up that are from such different worlds but have done such dynamic things—they’re all, in a way, equal to what Kim has done in TV or what I had done in music. I was so moved that I just wanted people to stop and think they weren’t sitting at a table full of fashion people, they weren’t sitting at a table full of celebrities, they weren’t sitting at a table full of movie directors.

It really was a representation of the way we receive information today, post-Internet. And so Page Six can’t overshadow the main point: Carine Roitfeld was sitting next to Kim Kardashian. That alone to me is like the same moment when I brought Mos Def to the studio with Jay Z. It’s about the people, and the fact that they’re from different walks of life, and that they’re working together and not discriminating against each other. There was a class system, and now there’s a creative class system, and I think that’s what you were talking about a bit—the class system of creativity.

On why people are actually mad at Kim

…when people try to spoof or talk shit, it’s like: But you’re mad because basically Kim is the type of girl that, her entire life, if you were in school with her, most people would be studying and up late nights, but for some reason she would have the skill set to go and grab the one book, turn to the exact page, and just magically say, “That’s the exact answer.” Or she could wink at the person who had done all the work and get it done anyway. And the point of life is getting shit done and being happy.

On Why Kim K is so powerful in his life

One of the reasons why I think that me and Kim are very powerful together isn’t just the concept of celebrity or this mega rap star and this mega-beautiful pop star. It’s something I explain to my girl: She is who she is. I am who I am. We have advisers and friends and everything, but those people are who they are and we are who we are. And what I had to learn from Kim is how to take more of her advice and less of other people’s advice. There’s a lot of Kim K skills that were added. In order to win at life, you need some Kim K skills, period.

On what makes Kanye happy

But what makes me happy is land, and we’re on a boat now. This is Christopher Columbus. This is uncharted waters we’re on. We’d be super happy to be on land, and also a little bit like, “Ah, the journey’s over!” But I feel like, we got the Vogue cover, Steve McQueen won the Oscar, we finally got married… You know? We have a child. We’re a family now. I am an arbiter of taste, and people think that I have the ability to make things cool—or if I’m doing it, it should be cool. And I feel that this stuff’s starting to be cool. And that feels good to me. Because I don’t like walking around with people thinking I’m doing uncool shit, because there’s nothing I’m doing that’s uncool. It’s all innovative. You just might not understand it yet. But it’s cool. Family is super cool. Going home to one girl every night is super cool. Just going home and getting on the floor and playing with your child is super cool. Not wearing a red leather jacket, and just looking like a dad and shit, is like super cool. Having someone that I can call Mom again. That shit is super cool.

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