Apparently when Kanye was a kid (age-wise of course), he would make beats by making erotic video games. He then dropped the erotic game and stuck with the beats.
Wise career move by the Grammy winner. Good idea to leave that erotic game making biz.
"First beat I did," he recalls, "was in seventh grade, on my computer. I got into doing beats for the video games I used to try to make. My game was very sexual. The main character was, like, a giant penis. It was like Mario Brothers, but the ghosts were, like, vaginas. Mind you, I'm 12 years old, and this is stuff 30-year-olds are programming. You'd have to draw in and program every little step—it literally took me all night to do a step, 'cause the penis, y'know, had little feet and eyes."
Inspired by his preteen Super-Sexual Mario Brothers project, West makes a pop-Freudian self-analysis. "People ask me a lot about my drive. I think it comes from, like, having a sexual addiction at a really young age," he says. "Look at the drive that people have to get sex—to dress like this and get a haircut and be in the club in the freezing cold at 3 A.M., the places they go to pick up a girl. If you can focus the energy into something valuable, put that into work ethic . . . "
West soon channeled it all into music. Devoting a year after high school to hip-hop, he sold enough beats—many at $200, $250 per to local drug dealers who fancied themselves producers—to get seed money for a move to the Big Apple.
"Like the Glow in the Dark tour—that was like going back and finally finishing up that video game. Except now it was me in the video game."
ReplyDeleteI start to remind him what the main character and the point of his game were, but Kanye West is way ahead of me.
"Oh, that happened," he says, flashing a smile, "but after the shows."