The Kanye West Method

What do you do when there aren't any doors open or paths paved for where you’re trying to go? If
you’re anything like Kanye West, you hold close to your ambitions and self confidence and let them
carry you through all the gauntlets you’ll face on your quest for excellence. We all know that Kanye has
never shied away from speaking to great lengths about his own accomplishments, how great he is, or
how he’s a superstar. What most people don’t know is that this mental model wasn’t something that
Kanye picked up once he started having success in the hip hop industry. Long before he dropped his first
album The College Dropout, Kanye had always held strong to his own confidence. Kanye credits his
success to his self esteem, saying he would have never been able to achieve the things he’s done had he
not been the only person to believe in his vision. Imagine being in a room with a bunch of important
industry people, giving them your life’s work, trying to pitch them into buying into what you believe
would literally change the world for the better, and being shot down with criticism and cynical remarks.
Now put yourself in that situation about three times a week for a year or two and you have the
beginnings of Kanye’s career as a rapper. It almost sounds like the plot to The Pursuit of Happiness.

Kanye faced a lot of adversity from his peers for his rapping ability when he was first emerging on the
scene as a producer. He had always seen himself as the total package, listening to hip hop and learning
how to rap around the time he was in the third grade before learning how to produce beats. Yet when
he was first finding his grounding within the industry during his late teenage years, people valued him
for his ability to make beats but didn’t much believe in his ability to produce a record with his own lyrics
on them. Nearly everybody he worked with would urge him away from trying to produce songs and put
his own rhymes on top. Kanye knew he had it within himself to be the great MC that he would go on to
become, but the people surrounding him at the time didn’t always share this sentiment with him,
insisting that he stay in his own lane. It would take years of persistence and one near fatal car crash that
birthed the song Through The Wire until Kanye was finally able to get to releasing his own album, but
what would keep him a major player in the world of hip hop for years to come is his unique creative
process and larger than life view on music’s potential to be a great vehicle for change.

Innovation is what makes Kanye bigger than any other rapper putting lyrics on trap drums and 808 bass.
When you create something the likes of which has never existed before, you put yourself in the position
to be a trend setter, or a pioneer. I’m talking about Ye making use of sped-up high-pitch vocal samples in
his songs in the era when people were getting down to “Its your Birthday” by 50 Cent and “Tipsy” by J-
Kwon, no shade thrown to either of those tracks or artists. Having something that separates you from
the crowd and embracing it and using it in a way that’s tasteful and not gimmicky is key. I’m talking
about experimenting with your sonic vocabulary and getting a synthesizer to make noises that sound like
vocals (Graduation album clip from Vox video). I’m talking about putting out three albums heavily
steeped in hip hop, and then throwing caution to the wind, disregarding any concerns about backlash or
the disenfranchisement of your fans, and putting out a pop album with melancholy tones, 808s and
Heartbreaks.

808s and Heartbreaks took hip hop to pop arenas. In a time when auto-tune was looked down upon by
nearly everyone in the hip hop world -- his idol and contemporary Jay-Z even making a song called
“Death of Autotune” – Kanye would press on. By fusing auto-tuned singing with downbeat lyrics harping
on themes of heartbreak and vulnerability, he’d effectively broken down the walls of him being just
another artist in the genre of hip hop by exposing a more sensitive side of his humanity. This album
specifically would go on to greatly influence other music artists such as Drake, Frank Ocean, Kid Cudi,
and Childish Gambino. Even artists outside of the realms of hip hop like James Blake and Bon Iver would
 The Kanye West Method

draw influences from the album. This kind of growth and development is a product of experimenting
with sounds and interacting with scenes that are out of one’s comfort zone.

Exposing another dimension of his musical sensibility had posed him to become the musical
phenomenon and icon that he aspired to be. While he was raised on the likes of hip hop artists such as
KRS One, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest, DMX and LL Cool J, to name a few, Kanye’s early
musical idols were actually pop sensations like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and George Michael.
Kanye would go on to say “Michael Jackson is my favorite artist of all time. Every time I hit a stage, every
time I write a song, every time I rap, every performance I do, every time I pick an outfit, I think about
Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson is synonymous with the greatest that you could possibly do in music.”
These were artists who affected more than just their own genre, they affected the world with their
presence in popular culture. This was the scope that Kanye hoped to achieve in his musicality. Not
content with being just another hip hop rapper or producer, he wanted to be a household name, an
entity in peoples every day life and consciousness. He wants to influence the world.

As it stands, with the exception of Kid Cudi, there isn’t another rapper out who’s progressed through as
many sound signatures as Kanye has. From soulful hip hop, to down tempo pop melancholy, back to
hard-hitting hip hop bangers, to deconstructed, minimal, aggressive and yet intelligent dissonance, and
all the way back to hip hop. His sonic range is wider than a majority of other rappers. His craft is
unrivaled because he’s an incredible student. People talk about having a good ear for music or a good
gut feeling when it comes to music production, and he’s got both. But they didn’t emerge from
happenstance, these things were challenged and developed and honed because this is somebody who
values creativity in all different forms and takes it all seriously. This isn’t somebody who only came up off
of listening to and studying hip hops underground legends, this is somebody who appreciates art for
art’s sake.

He’s not somebody solely entrenched in hip hop culture, his interests and tastes span a broad range,
and I’d credit some of this to him having attended art school for some time before dropping out at the
age of 20. A focus on artistry and innovation instead of experimenting within a limited world of musical
conventions gives him an edge above other artists competing for hip hops most prestigious accolades. In
the world of fashion, he’s said that Marc Jacobs is his idol for “merging all worlds, the way he’s big in the
hood and the head of the number one fashion house in the world.” In the realm of visual arts, he’s
shown admiration and collaborated with artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, KAWS, Eli Russell Linnetz,
Romain Gavras, Hype Williams, Chris Milk, George Condo, and Takashi Murakami, to name a few. This
goes to that show that being open-minded and art-oriented definitely pays off, because how else could
you put trust in all of these people to represent your vision and brand?

The world is huge but creatives are few and far between. The world has so much to gain when creatives
find each other and collaborate on projects instead of competing against one another. Kanye for the
most part has done a great job in his music career of seeking out other creatives and getting them to put
their spin on what he’s working on. This is why his products are unique. A creative genius such as Kanye
knows he’s only limiting himself when he doesn’t bring anyone else into the mix of what he’s doing. This
willingness to collaborate, coupled with his openness to any and all feedback on his projects – no matter
where they are in terms of completion – is Kanye’s recipe for creative success. He’s open, he knows how
to reach out, and he puts people exactly where they need to be.
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Now getting back to the part about feedback, I think this is one of the most important things to reflect
on. Kanye’s craft lives off of live feedback. There has been so many instances in which Ye has performed
his verses for people off the cuff just to get their thoughts on it before he’d release them to the world. In
one instance, Kanye performed his verses for all of the tracks on Life of Pablo for Seth Rogen inside of a
limousine. After every track played, he’d ask Rogen what he thought of it, and this lasted about two
whole hours. In another instance, while working on his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, 
rapper and producer Q-Tip was quoted saying “With Kanye, when he has his beats or his rhymes, he
offers them to the committee and we’re all invited to dissect, strip, or add-on to what he’s already
started. By the end of the sessions, you see how he integrates and transforms everyone’s contributions,
so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts… everybody’s opinions mattered and counted… If the
delivery guy comes in the studio and Kanye likes him and they strike up a conversation, he’ll go, ‘Check
this out, tell me what you think.’”

Kanye is someone who operates with a certain degree of creative whimsy. There have been multiple
times in his career where he would have 2/3 of an album done only to be given new direction by one
development that would set him off down the rabbit hole however deep it goes. In this sense, he
operates loosely, free from deadlines for the most part with the exception of self imposed ones. He let’s
his own creativity take him wherever it leads. One of the greatest examples of this is the production of
the song “Stronger” from Graduation, of which Ye had produced in upwards of 75 different versions of
the song before deciding which one to place on the album.

Can you imagine how music would sound if every artist was that obsessive and dedicated to their craft?
If this degree of care and intention was present in music more often than we might not be stuck in
perpetual states of complacency with the cookie-cutter artists making the just passable songs that
dominate our airwaves. If we all could find ways to incorporate elements of the Kanye West Method
into our own creative processes than we might just be able to raise the bar enough to tread new and
exciting territory.