Why Kanye West really is the world's No 1 rock star

Armen4Ik — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 11:08:26 GMT

It says something about the kind of year Kanye West's had that his claim to be "the World's No 1 Rock Star" was relatively easy to miss. What price a bit of self-aggrandisment no different from the claims of dozens of hopeless Britpoppers to be "the best band in the world", when set next to the other stuff he's said in 2013? There was the interview with the New York Times, in which he announced that "the world would win" if only more people would "respect my trendsetting abilities", then variously compared himself not merely to Gil Scott Heron and Miles Davis, but Le Corbusier, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Nicolas Ghesquière (the creative designer of Louis Vuitton), Anna Wintour and David Stern. It wasn't 100% clear if by the latter he meant David Stern the artist, David Stern the commissioner of the National Basketball Association or indeed David E. Stern, voted the 22nd most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine in 2011, although given the tenor of the interview, you wouldn't bet against him meaning all three of them. There was the interview with Radio 1's Zane Lowe, which succeeded in making the normally irrepressible DJ sound like the voice of calmness and reason, as he gently suggested West might consider some formal training before moving into the field of architecture, the rapper's self-proclaimed similarity to Gaudi notwithstanding. West, meanwhile, proffered the intriguing notion that the only possible response to any of his creative endeavours in any field of the arts was to thank him "for making civilisation better". And then there was the interview on Eminem's Sirius XM radio station in which he appeared to go completely bananas. At one juncture, he yelled at the interviewer: "I'm standing back and telling you I AM WARHOL! I AM THE NO 1 MOST IMPACTFUL ARTIST OF OUR GENERATION. I AM SHAKESPEARE IN THE FLESH!", but it wasn't all as bashful and self-effacing as that.

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Why Kanye West really is the world's No 1 rock star