Way Out West

It’s official: Bright-yellow pantswear is a fashion don’t. Kanye West learns this immutable sartorial law the hard way, when he saunters into a midtown-Manhattan recording studio sporting jeans (and matching Nikes) of a hue somewhere between Banana Breeze and Scalding Sunburst. “How does this look?” West asks the roomful of friends and associates. A long silence follows. Finally, one of West’s backup singers speaks up: “Naw, man, that’s the worst yet.” “Damn!” says West, as everyone breaks into laughter.

It’s a steamy Saturday in July, and West has already spent the better part of an hour trying to put together a suitable outfit for this evening’s performance at Giants Stadium in New Jersey—the U.S. edition of Live Earth, Al Gore’s six-­continent-spanning environmental mega­concert. A certifiable dandy, West does not take such decisions lightly. “Clothes are my drug,” he’ll later say. “And I like to overdose.” Popping into an adjacent room to try on ensembles for his dozen-strong entourage, West dismisses one look as “very hood—a.k.a. wack.” There is an extended debate about which color combinations will stand out best against the backdrop of the Live Earth stage: a garish grid of car tires inset with flashing lights. For a few minutes, West settles on white trousers topped by a white polo-style shirt with a multicolored-pinwheel design splashed across the chest. “This shirt is fresh,” he crows. But then, doubts start creeping in. “The all-white, with the white Jordans, it’s too Diddyish,” he says. “Too St. Tropez.” Back to the drawing board.

“It isn’t always like this,” West says, after finally choosing a pair of gray jeans, a red polo topped with a white jacket and blindingly white new high-tops. “But you know, it’s a tough decision, what to wear on worldwide TV.” And Kanye West has a reputation to uphold. “With me,” he adds, “people expect the unexpected.”

Since first emerging from Chicago in the early part of this decade, West has maintained his status as one of popular music’s most reliable iconoclasts, with a thriving side-business in provocation and scandal. In 2004, he graduated from behind-the-scenes beatmaker to full-fledged hip-hop auteur and soon thereafter was declaring himself a “legend,” storming awards-show stages in indignation when denied prizes he knew were rightly his and posing for magazine covers costumed as Jesus Christ.

The bluster was extreme, but few could deny the powerful originality of his persona—and his music. He had a foot in both the earthy, boho-rap world of his Chicago homeboy Common and in the rare­fied realm of the Moët-swilling hip-hop elite—but wanted membership in neither. At a time when most rappers dressed in thugged-out streetwear or—on those special red-carpet occasions—double-­breasted Al Capone zoot suits, West was unabashedly metrosexual, nicknaming himself the “Louis Vuitton Don,” arriving on stages clad in pastel polos, sweater vests and other garb straight outta cocktail hour at the Kennebunkport yacht club. His songs were similarly full of contradictions and cognitive dissonances, outrageous boasts that segued into harsh self-criticism, tussles for Kanye’s soul that pit God against Mammon, lustful odes to diamond jewelry that veered into jeremiads about human-rights abuses in the global diamond trade.

It’s music that was presumed to have no commercial potential—West had to convince his friend Jay-Z to give him a record deal—but The College Dropout (2004) and Late Registration (2005) wracked up multi­platinum sales. They also won Grammys (though not the ones West would have preferred), topped critics polls and established West as the kind of pop star who gets invited along with a cadre of A-list celebrities to appear on a network-television special in the wake of a national catastrophe. So it was that Americans tuning in to NBC’s A Concert for Hurricane Relief on Septem­ber 2, 2005, found themselves watching a 28-year-old rapper excoriate the president—“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”—on live television. Apparently, NBC’s upper brass missed the memo. RE: Mr. Kanye West, expect the unexpected.

Now, as West readies the release of his third album, Graduation, it’s business as usual. Which is to say, it’s unusual. “If I was trying to make an album that sounded exactly like The College Dropout, then I’d be dropping off into the nostalgia world,” West says. “This album is going to challenge listeners.” The first single, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” is a slow, brooding song powered by an eerie vocal sample that West describes, with a shake of his head, as “so different—kind of African, kind of digital-sounding.” It’s far from an obvious choice for a lead single, a fact that pleases West to no end. “I encountered some resistance from the record label, because I have some other songs that are much more digestible. But ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’—that shit just cuts my soul. I had to drop it first.” And then there’s the second single, “Stronger,” an even bigger departure. A stormy dance track built around a robotic Daft Punk vocal loop and clobbering drums, it sounds more like big-beat electronica, or even rock, than hip-hop.

Which, apparently, is exactly the way West wants it. Ask him what music he’s listening to these days, and you’re left wondering if he’s been spending quiet evenings at home in the glow of his laptop, surfing the dweebiest corners of the rock blogosphere. “I love the Killers … I like Keane—they’re one of my favorite groups. And Modest Mouse. I like how authentic that album sounded, like it was from the ’60s.” West got turned on to Daft Punk by his DJ, A-Trak (“A-Trak is definitely a music snob—he could be, like, a blogger or whatever”). And then there’s West’s prime source for un-stuntastic sounds. “VH1 put me up on the All-American Rejects. It put me up on Regina Spektor. It put me up on Feist.”

The 2007 model Kanye West comes on like an indie-fied aesthete. He talks a blue streak about Takashi Murakami, the star Japanese pop artist West brought in to do a nerd-chic overhaul of the Graduation packaging. He raves about his forthcoming TV show, currently in preproduction, a classy “one-camera” sitcom on the ultimate high-middlebrow network, HBO. Go to West’s Web site, and the first thing you’ll see isn’t his big-budget Hype Williams–directed “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” video, but the Saturday Night Live–style spoof, commissioned by West himself, in which indie comedian Zach Galifianakis and folk warbler Will Oldham lip-sync “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” while romping around a North Carolina farm.

And then there are his musical excursions. That mix-tape freestyle, rap-sung to the tune of “Young Folks,” the chirrupy hit by Stockholm indie-pop combo Peter Bjorn and John. Another mix-tape joint, “Us Placers,” with West rhyming over a dour, nearly beatless loop from Thom Yorke’s “The Eraser.” That Fall Out Boy remix. “Homecoming,” a track on the new album performed with Chris Martin. It’s quite a list: quirky indie chanteuses; French electronica geeks; postrock eggheads. As you run down the discography, you find yourself thinking, Maybe it’s Kanye West who doesn’t care about black people.

Of course, West is merely following his muse, which these days is leading him in a direction he cheekily calls a “non-­no-brainer.” But West is determined to drag the world along with him. “See, I have a very clear goal,” he says. “I want to be the worldwide top artist. You can quote that. I want to be the No. 1 artist in the world.”