Kanye Covers December/January Complex

On the day that his fifth album was released, it was also revealed that Kanye West will cover the latest edition of Complex magazine. EIC Noah Callahan-Bever took readers to Hawaii (not literally) to unearth the making of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. By the way, I left work to buy the album, even though I’ve already had it for two weeks and had already heard all of the songs before. I needed that Deluxe Edition, and I had to hear the final, mastered version of the tracks. It was worth the $15. You can read NCB’s full account here, along with words from Pusha T, Bon Iver, Pete Rock and Nicki Minaj. Oh yeah, there are a ton of photos too. In addition, here’s NCB’s post-College Dropout ’04 interview with Kanye. Below is an excerpt, as well as some of the pics. Spotted at Nahright.

The sun sets, and Q-Tip and Consequence arrive, straight from the plane. Kanye asks RZA if he’d voice the hook—”Champagne wishes and 30 white bitches/You know the shit is, fuckin’ ridic’lous”—and the Abbott steps into the booth and obliges, immediately transforming from sedate and stoned to amped and aggressive. It’s enough to make us all chuckle on his first take; wrapped around those words, his thick and bizarre drawl just sounds so perfectly…RZA. But Kanye notices something off in the delivery, and he presses the intercom button to talk to RZA: “Um, fam, it’s actually ‘thirty white bitches,’ not ‘dirty white bitches.’” RZA laughs. “I’ll do it again,” he says, “but to be real, the way I be saying words, you ain’t gon’ be able to tell the difference.” Ha! At Rap Camp, the shit is fuckin’ ridiculous.

The rest of the trip settles into a fairly routine pattern, if by “fairly routine” you mean “a succession of both magical and mundane moments starring the musicians who defined your adolescence alongside the most exciting artists of today.” Each morning begins with a 10 a.m. breakfast at Kanye’s Diamondhead residence. Pusha, Tip, RZA, Cudi, Cons, and Kanye’s crew slowly assemble to enjoy the absurdly tasty cooking of Kanye’s in-house chefs. If you’re smart, you order the French toast with the flambéed banana. An hour later, Kanye pulls up in his Porsche Panamera, fresh from the studio. That’s right, from the studio. During my five days in Hawaii, Kanye never slept at his house, or even in a bed. He would, er, power-nap in a studio chair or couch here and there in 90-minute intervals, working through the night. Engineers remained behind the boards 24 hours a day.