Kanye West Slams Those Trying To "Mute" His Voice, Says He's A "Fine Artist"

Interview Magazine/Steven Klein

Kanye West covers the new issue of Interview magazine, and as always, the 36-year-old rapper gives all sorts of ridiculous quotes to 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen, who had the great honor of interviewing him. As usual, here are the highlights:

On people trying to silence him:

“People are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice in some way or make me look like I’m a lunatic or pinpoint the inaccuracies in my grammar to somehow take away from the overall message of what I’m saying.”

On family life with Nori and fiance Kim Kardashian:

"It's all brand new, how it feels to be a father. There are some things that I understand, certain things that I don't understand, certain things that I like to get off my chest in interviews, certain things that I want to talk about. But when we talk about love, I don't have an answer. All I can say is that I'm happy I have it."

On his laughably bad “Bound 2? video with Kardashian:

"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.”

On his background in the arts:

“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 ... 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.'"

On his struggle to get people to back him:

“I went around and showed people what I’d done and said, ‘Hey, I made “Watch the Throne,” I made this amount of music for the past 10 years, I have this level of visuals, this level of communication, I can sell this many albums, and I also have these new inventions. Will anybody help me out?’ I met with 30 billionaires, 30 companies, and basically everyone said, ‘F*ck you.’ I said, ‘How could this happen? How could not one person want to invest in these different ideas?’"

Oh Kanye ... and how to we even begin to discuss the below pic?