Have you read the Q&A that Kanye West did with the New York Times yet? If not, get on it. We've already listed some of the better quotes from the interview over here. But you really need to read the entire thing to fully appreciate it.
From a sports perspective, Kanye drops two gems within the interview while discussing the fact that he's known for trying to convince others of his greatness. First, he uses his eighth-grade basketball coach to illustrate how people will doubt you and continue to doubt you if you don't stand up for yourself and tell them to respect what you bring to the table.
"I think you got to make your case," he says. "Seventh grade, I wanted to be on the basketball team. I didn't get on the team, so that summer I practiced. I was on the summer league. My team won the championship; I was the point guard. And then when I went for eighth grade, I practiced and I hit every free throw, every layup, and the next day I looked on the chart, and my name wasn't on it. I asked the coach what's up, and they were like, 'You're just not on it.' I was like, 'But I hit every shot.' The next year—I was on the junior team when I was a freshman, that's how good I was. But I wasn't on my eighth-grade team, because some coach—some Grammy, some reviewer, some fashion person, some blah blah blah—they're all the same as that coach. Where I didn't 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!' I'm letting it out on everybody who doesn't want to give me my credit."
A short time later, Kanye also compares himself to the legendary Michael Jordan. Kanye says that, because he is who he is, he should be able to dictate what people think about certain things, much like MJ who used to yell at the referees and tell them that they were wrong.
"I'm going to use my platform to tell people that they're not being fair," he says. "Anytime I've had a big thing that's ever pierced and cut across the Internet, it was a fight for justice. Justice. And when you say justice, it doesn't 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.'"
Interesting. As we said, you really need to read the whole interview to get all of this in the proper perspective. But it's interesting to hear Kanye use a couple of sports analogies to help him get one of his points across.
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[via NYT]
