Kanye West’s much-discussed follow-up to Yeezus may hit stores sooner than expected. In a new interview with GQ, the provocative postmodern polymath discussed a wide range of subjects including coping with celebrity, his recent marriage to Kim Kardashian, and his thoughts on SPIN’s 2013 Album of the Year one year later. But he also dropped a few tantalizing details about his forthcoming Rick Rubin-produced full-length.
“I hope I can get one of these songs out in the next couple of weeks, just to have something up and running,” ‘Ye said. “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?”
Knowing how quickly he can work under pressure, September doesn’t seem like too difficult of a deadline, especially considering that he apparently has a new single called “All Day” close to finished which he sees as a pop-rap response to Yeezus‘ experimentalism.
“It’s like a pendulum. The pendulum gains momentum by swinging in the other direction. 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.”
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Elsewhere in the conversation West reflected on how far he’s come thus far in his career, though his future aim remains modest:
“I am a black American male from Chicago who had my rehearsal dinner at Versailles and then got married in Florence with a view of the entire city […] My goal is just to be respected as a man when I walk down the street with my family. I don’t care what your job is, you’re not gonna talk down to me, you’re not gonna try to get a rise out of me. I’m a man first. In establishing that, some interesting things have happened.”
Those “interesting things” — altercations with the press — were just him trying to achieve respect and defend his family, he explained, in animorphic terms:
“I don’t have fangs. I’m a porcupine. I’m not a shark, I’m a blowfish. I wasn’t coming out of my house going to a paparazzi’s house to attack them. I’m defending my family in front of my own house. I’m defending my name as someone’s screaming something negative at me. That’s a blowfish.”
And that’s perhaps the best news to come out of this whole interview: He’s finally coped with that South Park episode enough to talk about himself in fish-related terms again. Lastly, he had equally colorful descriptors for his wife:
“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!”
