Earlier this month, Kanye West was honoured with the Video Vanguard Award at the MTV Video Music Awards, and while I think he’s a raving lunatic, he’s also incredibly artistically talented and totally deserved the award. During his acceptance speech, he talked a whole lot of nonsense, some things of substance, and then made an offhand comment that most of us dismissed as classic Kanye: that he was going to run for president. Turns out, that wasn’t a joke – Kanye is running for president in 2020 and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
In an interview with Vanity Fair (which was more about his latest fashion collection than his presidential bid), Kanye said he’ll be spending the next few years studying everything he needs to know and then he wants to run for the highest office in the land so he can work to make the country a better place.
People didn’t seem to dismiss the idea. You would have thought there would be more of an outcry.
Especially from the six years of this misconception or the six years I went through of “We don’t like Kanye.” And then as soon as I said that, it was like, “Wait a second, we would really be into that, because actually if you think about it, he’s extremely thoughtful. Every time he’s ever gotten in trouble, he was really jumping in front of a bullet for someone else. He’s probably the most honest celebrity that we have.” I didn’t approach that because I thought it would be fun. It wasn’t like, Oh, let’s go rent some jet skis in Hawaii. No, the exact opposite. I sit in clubs and I’m like, Wow, I’ve got five years before I go and run for office and I’ve got a lot of research to do, I’ve got a lot of growing up to do. My dad has two masters degrees. My mom has a PhD, she used to work at Operation PUSH. Somehow the more and more creative I get, the closer and closer I get to who I was as a child. When I was a child, I was holding my mom’s hand at Operation PUSH. I think it’s time. Rap is great.
It’s fun. It’s fun to be a rock star, and I’ll never not be one I guess, but there’ll be a point where I become my mother’s child. With all the things I’ve done that people would consider to be accomplishments, what’s the point where I become the person that Donda and Raymond West raised? My parents’ child.
Will you have to give up your creative projects if you run?
I think about that. Because it’s so therapeutic for me to sit and work for seven days. We work on the collection year-round, every day to the office, we have an amazing team, but then you have that seven days before the show where you just really, really don’t sleep. . . . I have to stay creative. The whole point is to have someone [in office] that’s creative, that’s around amazing creatives. This is my theory: I think the world can be helped through design, so it’s very important that I stay around creative, forward thinkers. It’s very important that I continue to design, to be in practice of trying to make the best decisions possible. I hate politics. I’m not a politician at all. I care about the truth and I just care about human beings. I just want everyone to win, that’s all I can say, and I think we can. . . . I think the words “dreamer” and “passionate” diminish my will to execute. Because to be passionate about something or to dream about something does not say that it was executed. So when we talk about second season, it was executed. When we went and had a great season with stores, with Barneys and Luisa Via Roma and all these amazing stores, that was executed. When those Yeezys came out and sold what they did, that was executed. You can have the longest intellectual artistic conversation about anything and it all means nothing without execution.
