Kanye West sat next to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show and tried to rationalize the irrational. He struggled to joke back with Leno’s attempts to diffuse the situation. He fidgeted with his hair during an awkward silence.
One day earlier, West had taken the microphone from Taylor Swift and proclaimed her victory at the MTV Video Music Awards a mistake. But in this moment, West sat in front of viewers with regret.
He felt bad because he had hurt a person he considered talented. He said he had always wanted to help people in life and admitted his actions were wrong.
“It was rude,” West said. “Period.”
Then Leno asked West what his recently deceased mother would have thought of the incident. In the two years prior, West had lost his mother, broken up with his fiancee and released an album people didn’t appreciate.
West looked down and thought about how to answer the question. Twenty seconds passed before he said a word.
“I need to, after this, take some time off and analyze how I’m gonna make it through the rest of this life,” West said.
And that’s exactly what he did. He vanished from the public world for nearly two years and created a masterpiece.
It’s easy for people to look into the actions of West and purely see the narcissistic egomaniac who talks in nonsense and craves attention. It’s easy to see an asshole.
Maybe he is just that, but the roots of West’s actions are often misunderstood.
Kanye West is the rock star most die-hard music nerds would be if they became rock stars. He cares so much about the concept of culture and how society evaluates it that he sometimes loses his mind. He absolutely plays a calculated character, but the type of character he likely loved growing up. He’s a nerd.
One of the biggest keys to understanding West — coming from someone who has never met but pretends to understand him — is that he ignited the sensitive rap generation.
In a time of gangster rap, West took paint classes at the American Academy of Art and studied English for a short time at Chicago State University. While most rappers come up as teenagers and are stars before they can legally drink, West grinded for six years as a producer before being signed as a rapper.
His insane intensity may not stem from a drug-oriented youth or from poverty. He was raised in a middle-class environment, but he had to persevere through each and every stigma. He created an identity in music that had yet to be seen.
West is an emotional romantic. People often confuse his blatant honesty as him being a bad person. Everyone is a mess. We all do incredibly stupid things. He just isn’t afraid to speak specifically about sending girls pictures of his junk or his massive ego.
Most of his seemingly unforgivable actions come from more than ego, though. They come from caring so much about a thing we also care so much about: music.
He’s the kind of guy who stopped by the Rolling Stone offices to explain to them what an album meant. Yes, maybe now he is someone who shows no emotion and calculates each public move he makes.
But that withdrawal from the public comes from being so worn down from being so damn hated for every action he did which, which were all rooted in the fact he cared. A lot.
In that same interview with Leno, he spoke about wanting to help Swift move on from the incident. He tried to open up about trying to be a better person.
“I want to live this thing,” he said. “It’s hard sometimes.”
