Zane Lowe is now part of the Jesus Is King spectacle.
Thursday, on the eve of the album and film of the same name's release, Lowe (who previously bagged a classic interview during the Yeezus era) shared a new discussion with Kanye West in which they vowed to "cover everything."
The interview's release was preceded on Wednesday by an album/movie premiere event at the Forum in Inglewood. Attendees, the bulk of whom had their phones locked up in Yondr bags, were given the chance that evening to procure some MAGA-y merch that included a $45 Jesus Is King hat.
Listen to the new Zane x Kanye chat right here.
After an expectedly delayed start time, the interview finally aired over an hour behind schedule. As Lowe explained ahead of kickoff, the interview was filmed earlier this week.
"The more I am in service to God I just clear my head and just wake up more empty every day and let God do the driving and just use me as he may," West said near the top of the discussion when asked what he envisioned for his Wyoming-set developments. "You know, you make plans and God laughs."
After some chatting on the tearing down of his concept domes for being "10 feet too high," West compared advertising billboards in Los Angeles to sex-trafficking and claimed to be addicted to pornography.
"Playboy was my gateway into full-on pornography addiction," he told Lowe. "My dad had a Playboy left out at age five and it's affected almost every choice I made for the rest of my life from age five to now, having to kick the habit. It just presents itself in the open like it's OK. I stand up and say 'You know, it's not OK.'"
Something that is OK, at least according to West, is the business practices of Twitter's Jack Dorsey. Calling Dorsey an "incredibly smart visionary," West outlined why he admired him so much, connecting it to his Christianity.
"Now I'm letting you know what Jesus has done for me," he said. "I'm no longer a slave. I'm a son, now, a son of God. I'm thinking of something I wanna say out loud—Christian innovator. When you're thinking about the church—because it has to stand on the word so hard—it loves to be extra traditional to the point of blocking innovation."
When asked if his Sunday Services project was a "church" itself, West initially declined to outright say "it's a church," instead recalling a moment in which his daughter North West said it resembled church to her. He also noted that the project does have a pastor.
"I will no longer entertain," he added of his individual ambitions, at least currenty. "I am not here for anyone's entertainment."
Speaking on the sessions behind the new album, West revealed a few temporary lifestyle tweaks he requested from his collaborators. In addition to fasting, West at one point asked for collaborators to refrain from any sexual intercourse that's unhindered by the confines of marriage.
"There's times where I was asking people to not have premarital sex while they were working on the album," he said.
Going deeper into God stuff, West explained how he views "culture" and its current meaning.
"I thought I was the god of culture but really culture was my god . . . What is a culture today? What are some of the major things that it includes and all of the major points of what might make the culture?" he said. "Taking a knee at a football game, wearing expensive clothes, rapping about—just rap, period—making money from rap, making money from basketball, buying jewelry. Using social media is a very major part of the culture. To be down with or part of the culture, you have to use social media. None of these things that you need to be involved in order to be down with the culture are owned by black people. So who designed the culture?"
Social media at large also took some criticism from West: "Social media prompts women in particular to put out content that they wouldn't have in the past . . . When I was younger and I wanted to see something like that I had to pay someone who was older to go to 7-Eleven and buy it," he said.
But back to the music. West later said he was "the greatest human artist of all time," stating that his maddening decision to Trumpify himself was "God's practical joke on all liberals." He then repeated a litany of tired talking points about red vs. blue, etc.
This conversational turn eventually landed on matters of Drake, who—when West isn't in Wyoming—is practically a neighbor. "I go to Drake's house and just will leave my phone number," he said of Drake, with whom he fairly recently had a public rivalry. "'Here's my cell.' I'm not trying to ring the doorbell and say 'Oh, you gotta come outside right now.' He might be busy. You know, he got a studio in there." From there, he talked of the "lineage" from JAY-Z to himself to Drake.
Elsewhere, he accused Nike of starting "the Anti Kanye club" once he left and took his design prowess to Adidas and doubled tripled down on the God stuff.
At any rate, Jesus Is King will be available Friday. Mike Dean chimed in on the album's imminence Thursday, tweeting that some last-minute mastering was underway:
Though it should be taken perhaps not literally, West did let loose word during the interview that he intends to release another album called Jesus Is Born this Christmas.
