Kanye West

Kanye West flies commercial. Sure, he may seem like the collar-popping embodiment of hip-hop glamour, but West endures air-travel indignity just like everyone else. A recent flight down the East Coast, for example, proved fatal to his Japanese backpack, the casualty of a faulty lavatory that leaked into the first-class cabin. It would be nice to avoid hassles like this. It would be nice if a man with property in Beverly Hills didn’t have to carry his valuables in a plastic sack with an airline logo on the side, after having his nice Asian luggage suffer death by toilet. Unfortunately, there’s this little problem. “I really can’t afford to fly private all the time,” West says on a steamy Atlanta afternoon, comfortably ensconced in Doppler Studios, a discreet recording facility where he’ll spend the next several hours working on his third album, Graduation. “It’s a lot of people who can’t afford to fly private. It’s only maybe 10 entertainers who really, really, really get down with it.”

This self-effacing nugget is shocking on multiple levels. For starters, Kanye West—like most rappers—is hardly known for admitting weakness, financial or otherwise. For another, it seems impossible that a man with two multi-platinum albums can’t afford to fly any damned way he pleases. And yet, compared with some of his more entrepreneurial peers, West has a pretty one-dimensional portfolio: He focuses on making music, freely admitting to a lack of business acumen.

To compensate, he has developed a plan. “I decided that I’m really going to be the number-one artist in the world, and that’s the way I’ll really get up into that multimillion,” he says. “I’ll get up there through music. I’ll just be the best at this right here, and then eventually try to get to that touring thing that U2 does and Rolling Stones do. Yeah. That’s the goal.”

To be the best. It’s not such a rare aspiration, really. Every Olympic athlete, every Wall Street tycoon, every Top Gun pilot, Harvard medical student and grand master of chess wants essentially the same thing. And, in so many ways, West seems to have the perfect formula for success: He’s handsome. He’s ambitious. He’s both street-smart and book-smart. He’s a deceptively intricate lyricist with a mischievous wit and a golden ear. He appeals to hip-hop purists who crave authenticity and to rap novices who just want “Gold Digger” for the ringtone. He has pan-racial appeal, having toured with both Usher and U2. He has pan-generational appeal, having dedicated the first song on his first album to “the kids” and having penned earnest odes to his family matriarchy on his sophomore disc. He makes music for fry cooks, frat boys, ballers and bankers.

“When I was on tour with Bono,” West recalls, “he said, ‘Nobody from your community has ever figured this out, except for Michael Jackson.’ And, of course, people always have a negative connotation whenever you bring up Michael Jackson now. But the positive thing is, he really did do stadiums. He really was that one. And I feel like I’m that one.” And yet, there are obstacles on the path to world-domination. West has a reputation—earned through assorted tantrums—for being rather petulant. His misbehavior at awards shows has become legendary. He notoriously bum-rushed the stage to protest losing an MTV Europe Award for best video to Justice and Simian, and he reportedly called country singer Gretchen Wilson “bullshit” after losing best new artist to her at the American Music Awards. His confidence has been construed as egomania. His flossy clothes give an impression of vanity. His wit is occasionally blunted by a lyrical coarseness that seems either pandering to the lowest common denominator or just plain lazy. West has also been known to boast about both materialism and spirituality, making him seem like a hypocrite. Oh, and he once called the president a racist on live national television. West is 30 years old and seasoned enough to have perspective on all of this. But it’s a perspective tangled up in the very contradictions that land him in trouble in the first place. “I get a really bad rap of being arrogant,” he says, “when I’m really one of the nicer people that I know.”

He's softer than you’d expect. In person, that is. Softer and calmer. His hairline is finely detailed, framing his face. He has long eyelashes. He is pretty in the way that a young Muhammad Ali was pretty. He lives fast and yet, apart from a faint scar etched diagonally across his nose, he appears to move through life unscathed.

West has rapped gleefully about this very thing. When he recorded his early anthem "Through The Wire" with his jaw wired shut after a 2002 car crash, he provided meta-commentary on his condition: I must got a angel, ’cause look how death missed his ass / Unbreakable. What, you thought they called me Mr. Glass?

Back then, he was best known as the architect behind Jay-Z’s landmark album, The Blueprint, a record that owed an enormous debt to the vintage rock and soul samples West used as a musical backdrop. By dusting off old Doors and Jackson 5 material for Jay to rap over, West gave The Blueprint sonic dimension and musical context. By placing Jay next to Jim Morrison, West compounded the album’s bravado. By using melodic detail from “I Want You Back,” West announced that Jay was making a classic on par with Motown’s best. In short, West did what producers are supposed to do—he made the artist look good.

Producers rarely succeed as solo acts (Pharrell Williams and Timbaland have each released heinous albums under their own names, despite being two of hip-hop’s all-time great beatmakers) so West came hard on his 2004 debut, The College Dropout. He secured a key guest vocal from then-rising star Jamie Foxx on the uproarious single “Slow Jamz,” and he dared radio stations to play his spiritual manifesto “Jesus Walks” (which they did). And then there was “Through The Wire,” a song that proved West could deliver a hit without even opening his mouth.

If Dropout demonstrated West’s potential as an artist, then Late Registration—his cinematic follow-up—made him a mainstream star, thanks to the Adam Levine collaboration “Heard ’Em Say,” the political “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” and, of course, the crossover smash “Gold Digger.”

Even while becoming an A-list rapper, West continued to successfully produce everyone from benevolent Chicago homeboy Common to West Coast gangsta rapper The Game. This is a bigger deal than it may initially seem. The more music West makes, the more he seems like the world’s most accomplished producer/artist. In all of pop-music history, no one has triumphed as mightily in both capacities. To fully appreciate how rare West’s versatility is, try to imagine Phil Spector crooning a power ballad on The Tonight Show or Sam Phillips headlining Madison Square Garden. They couldn’t do it, and neither could any other legendary producer. Steve Albini is too cantankerous to be a celebrity, and Brendan O’Brien is too shy. Rick Rubin has all the sex appeal of ZZ Top. And if you put top hip-hop producers Scott Storch, Just Blaze and Swizz Beatz in a lineup, 99 percent of even die-hard rap fans wouldn’t know who was who. West, on the other hand, recently performed at Live Earth alongside John Mayer and The Police. He fit in just fine.