Kanye West: “You Can’t Tear Down Michael Jackson”

It is hard to imagine Kanye West being interviewed by Pharrell Williams. But it happened. They sat down for the i-D interview with Vice and things were legendary — as you’d imagine would happen when two of the biggest stars of contemporary music come together.

Kanye West had a compliment to offer to Pharrell: “It felt like you really tore down the walls and the doors much like Michael Jackson did a generation before, and in a way, he’s very similar to Michael Jackson, in the ways where Michael Jackson was doing covert, super gangsta stuff, like he’d just pop the needles off.”

Going off that tangent, he dove deep into what he thought of Michael Jackson, which he has in the past been very vocal about as well when the documentary — ‘Leaving Neverland’ — exposing Michael Jackson and his lifestyle first came out. In this interview too, he said, “We should have something that says we can’t allow any company to tear down our heroes. Not on The Shade Room, not on social media and especially not in documentaries.”

Kanye then compared his self to how Michael Jackson’s public image was handled, “I’m like every time the media isn’t happy with me it’s like, ‘Here they go. They’re gonna come and Wacko Jacko me.’ Which in some ways, they’ve tried to do.”

Talking about black culture with Pharrell Williams, Kanye talked about what Michael Jackson meant to popular culture, “He kissed Elvis Presley’s daughter on MTV. Black culture used to be… we used to be fronting all night, but Michael was doing stuff that was different to what we were programmed to understand as being what we should do.”

Inevitably, there was conversation around COVID-19 and the aftermath we are looking at. “Life’s going to have a different kind of gravity than it’s ever had before,” Pharrell Williams said to Kanye West. “It’s also gonna make us really separated. We’re disconnecting from each other even though online we’re probably more connected than we’ve ever been. It’s a bit like the Tower of Babel, if you will. We’ve never been this close, and there’s a lot of advantages that come with that. There’s a lot of disadvantages, too, and a lot of grey areas.”

By: Nupur Saraswat