Granderson: Kanye West’s life and art are one. You don’t have to keep watching him. If you look at his life and his art, his art is what brings him to that place, and he’s in complete control of it every time.
I want to talk about that on Friday. I have to go to the White House Correspondents Dinner and I’m not going to be there, so I’m just going to talk about how he is the most influential person in our culture today. If he could ever bring himself to say something about the country, not be about Kanye West — what would he say? I haven’t seen him be the person Kanye West would say, I would have to ask him.
Kanye: There’s so much I want to say. I want to say — I want to say it in different ways, but for me, I want to say it with the spirit. My spirit is very much from the spirit of West Side Story. I love the West Side Story movie so much. They changed the songs that were in the movie from the original, the songs, and they made a different film, so that’s how I was thinking about my life, and that’s how I’ve always been thinking about my life.
Like the first time I saw West Side Story, and I was like, “Yo, this is the greatest thing you’ve ever done.” It was this amazing song that he had that he wanted me to sing. [I sang] “Dance with me, let’s get down.” You know, I didn’t think that could really happen. I mean, he was like, “You know what, I want you to do this and I want you to go home and practice and you will be so good and you won’t be embarrassed.”
When I sang that, people went crazy. I got the chance to meet him after that and I was even more blown away. It was incredible. I felt that I had done something and I felt like I had accomplished something. I felt like I had gotten this chance to do something — I didn’t get to do anything for a couple of days, but in that time, I had a chance to meet this man who had like a super-human power,