Mark Beaumont - Kanye West: God Monster

Thats not good. We gotta share the rap but this video cost a million dollars, fam! I had Pam Anderson, Im jumping across canyons and shit! Oh! Hey, if I dont win the award show loses credibility. I appreciate it, man, its nothing against you, Ive never seen your video, its nothing against you, but heeell no, man. I love you all.

Kanye West, interrupting Justices Best Video acceptance speech at MTV Europe Music Awards, Bella Centre, Copenhagen, November 2, 2006

J aw stern against the spotlights, eyes blazing, Kanye soaked in the silence, the vacuum left by taped music being sucked from the room. The audience glared back at him, shocked, embarrassed, teetering on his reaction.

He raised the microphone and went to speak.

For the last time in his life, nothing came out.

The seven-year-old Kanye West fled the stage, his Stevie Wonder sunglasses hiding his tears. At the side of the talent contests stage his mother, Donda, swept him up, stroking his costume braids. Shed watched him practise lip-syncing along to I Just Called To Say I Love You for weeks. She knew that, as something of a veteran of the Chicago childrens talent contest circuit, he felt he was the best act of the night. And she knew that, at the worst possible moment, the guy operating the backing track had cut the music right at Kanyes favourite part, no New Years Day .

In the car home, Kanye bewailed the injustice. I wasnt done! he bawled, I could have won! Donda reassured him, Youll win next year, honey, and a steely determination set in. No longer would he have his talent brushed off, dismissed out of hand; never again would he be denied the recognition and acclaim he deserved. And when he wasnt, he wouldnt bottle it up.

The following year, Kanye won the same contest. And the following year. And the year after that. In fact, Kanye won it every year until they changed the format, making the event a straightforward talent show where no one won or lost. Kanyes belief in himself was vindicated, along with his deep-rooted conviction that hard work and raw talent should be fairly rewarded.

It wouldnt be the last time the young Kanye fought for his own brand of fairness.

In seventh grade, Kanye decided he wanted to be on his schools basketball team. On his first attempt he didnt make the cut, but hed been brought up by the attentive Donda to believe that he was capable of anything if he worked hard enough. So that whole summer he practised intently, clawing his way onto an amateur summer league team as a point guard and helping his team win the championship. By the eighth grade try-outs he was vastly improved, hitting every shot in the practice session. Yet when he raced to the pinboard to see whod made the team, once more his name was missing.

I asked the coach whats up, and they were like, Youre just not on it, he said. I was like, But I hit every shot. Though hed refuse to fail and would go on to make the junior team the following year, he never forgot that coach who barred him from the team when hed proved he was good enough. Every time hed be snubbed for an award, not taken seriously by fashion designers or critics or put down by reviewers, it would be that coachs face hed see, telling him he just wasnt on it.

Where I didnt feel that I had a position in eighth grade to scream and say, Because I hit every one of my shots, I deserve to be on this team!, Im letting it out on everybody who doesnt want to give me my credit, hed say. [When I hit all my shots] you put me on the team. So Im going to use my platform to tell people that theyre not being fair. Anytime Ive had a big thing thats ever pierced and cut across the internet, it was a fight for justice. Justice. And when you say justice, it doesnt have to be war. Justice could just be clearing a path for people to dream properly. It could be clearing a path to make it fair within the arena that I play. You know, if Michael Jordan can scream at the refs, me as Kanye West, as the Michael Jordan of music, can go and say, This is wrong.

So when Kanye invaded the stage during the Best Video acceptance speech from the ironically named electro act Justice at the EMAs in 2006, stared sternly out into the crowd and complained loudly that he should have won for his video for Touch The Sky the moment that his reputation as raps biggest, most egotistical loudmouth first reared its head he was simply following his natural instinct to speak out against slights he perceives against his talent and effort. A homage to Evel Knievels failed jump across Snake River Canyon in 1974, Touch The Sky was an impressive piece of work, a seventies Blaxploitation style clip starring Kanye as Evel Kanyevel, a motorcycle stuntman preparing for his biggest ever jump, riding a Death Rocket across the Grand Canyon. With the Booker T Washington High School marching band and news crews seeing him off, Lupe Fiasco providing a guest spot, comic interludes referencing his off-script claim that George Bush doesnt care about black people during a to-camera speech during the previous years Concert For Hurricane Relief Kanyevel, are you concerned about the effects of your comments about President Nixon? a TV interviewer asks him and stars such as Pamela Anderson playing his argumentative wife and Nia Long his angry ex-girlfriend, it was certainly an expensive endeavour. In his outburst, Kanye may have mistaken the cost of production for quality and the credibility of the ceremony for commercial concerns. But as he hugged Justice and left the stage to continue his tirade in backstage media interviews Its complete bullshit, he said, I paid a million it took a month to film, I stood on a mountain. I flew a helicopter over Vegas I did it to be the king of all videos, while admitting hed had a sippy sippy he was speaking for a minor part of a major talent, the ambition and potential of which the world was only then beginning to glimpse.

Over the coming years, Kanye would justify such acts of perceived arrogance over and over again. His albums would break barrier after barrier, both in the inventiveness of their sounds and the breadth and openness of their genre-straddling collaborations. Theyd shatter, reinvent and reform rap music until it became virtually unrecognisable in tone, fashion and sentiment. Time and again Kanye would pioneer a brand new approach, make it so successful it spawned a whole range of mainstream imitators, then immediately abandon it for something even more challenging and revolutionary. He became a character with what seemed like a vastly inflated opinion of himself and his work, yet repeatedly lived up to if not superseded it on record.

Along the way Kanye became the most loved, hated, admired, ridiculed, celebrated, lampooned and consistently unignorable force in rap. A self-proclaimed God and a mutherfuckin monster.

Stand well back. Were clipping free the wire.

T he West empire, you might say, was built on a quarter.

A 25 cent piece, pressed into the palm of nine-year-old Portwood Williams at the central train station in Oklahoma City one afternoon in 1925. His father placed the coin in Portwoods hand, handed a dime to each of his two sisters, then stepped onto a train without ever telling them where he was headed. Wherever he went, he never came back.

Portwood rolled the quarter in his palm, hot with sweat and significance. Though hed never stop loving his father none of the Williams clan would his parting gift would grow to symbolise Portwoods determination to stand by his family to the bitter end, to live his life as a bastion of unconditional support and love to those that needed him. Portwood Williams would be no deserter. Portwood would provide.