In a wide-ranging new interview with Will Welch for GQ, Kanye West has spoken about new music, struggling with alcohol dependency and his politics, among other things.
In the interview, the rapper talks about how he was inspired to start “rapping for God” after one of his pastors approached him and said, “My son just said that he would want a rap album Jesus from Kanye West.”
“He didn’t say, ‘Kanye West, you should do this,’ or ‘you need to do this.’ He just told me something that a child said. And that one thing made the difference.”
West goes on to explain that he has begun abstaining from alcohol since he realised he “needed to take it day by day”, and the pair acknowledge there was never a public perception that West had an issue with alcohol dependency.
“One day I was in my office working on the couture collection, and there was some Grey Goose in the fridge and I was just going to get a daytime drink, and I looked and thought, ‘Devil, you’re not going to beat me today.'”
“I never owned up, or was even told, ‘Hey, you’re a functioning alcoholic.’ People have called me a crazy person, people have called me everything—but not a functioning alcoholic,” West explains. “And I would be drinking orange juice and Grey Goose in the morning.”
The interview touches on West’s politics, and his views seem to be largely unchanged – he explains that he’s planning on voting for the first time this election, and (unsurprisingly) indicates he’ll be voting for Donald Trump.
“I’m not going to be told by the people around me and the people that have their agenda that my career is going to be over. Because guess what: I’m still here! Jesus Is King was No. 1,” says West. “What’s the point of being a celebrity if you can’t have an opinion? Everybody make their own opinion! You know?”
“Both my parents were freedom fighters, and they used to drink from fountains they were told they couldn’t drink from, and they used to sit in restaurants where they were told they couldn’t eat from,” says West later in the interview. “They didn’t fight for me to be told by white people which white person I can vote on.”
You can read the full interview here.
