The one movie Kanye West has watched more than any other
In a genre saturated in big personalities often dripping with controversy, confidence, and wit, it is quite the accomplishment that Kanye West is the crowned king of Saying Things. Whether flying off the deep end in a conspiracy spiral, or an old clip going viral once again for his unapologetic, says-it-how-it-is-style of humour, Ye is any podcast host’s dream guest.
And for measure, Bret Easton Ellis is the perfect podcast host for a character like Kanye.
The author most celebrated for his novel American Psycho is considered one of the greatest writers of his generation, noted for his detached narrative style and cold, razor-sharp assessment and dismantlement of society. His novels often explore themes of vacuous alienation across his generation, usually within glamorous trappings. Not too dissimilar to Kanye, in which cynicism towards the emptiness of excess is a trodden path in his lyricism. This is, arguably, most notable in his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but also comes back alive on Yeezus a few years later: the Grammy-nominated ‘New Slaves’ may as well be an Easton Ellis novel in its own right.
Appearing on Easton Ellis’s podcast in 2013, Kanye spoke with the author in his podcast series’ The Bret Easton Ellis Experience debut. Setting, as Pitchfork put it, the bar “impossibly high”.
A few minutes into the interview, the pair discuss movies.
“I still am passionate about movies,” Easton Ellis tells Kanye. “I mean, I write movies, I still have that habit of wanting to see movies all the time, and I want to make movies as well. I’m actually wondering… what your answers would be… Do you have that same feeling? Do you think that when you look back at the movie that made you want to do something with your life, the movie that made you want to… see movies in a different way? The movies you have the earliest memories of? Those questions automatically made you go back to your early adolescence, your childhood.”
“If you look at the movies that have that kind of initial impact on you,” Easton Ellis continued. “Or would you say no, it’s movies from ten years ago, it’s movies from five years ago?”
“Yeah, they’re way further in between now,” Kanye replied. “The movies that you watch over and over. Maybe the movie in recently history that I’ve watched over and over like into that, thirty times and forty times, it be like, There Will Be Blood. But the movie I’ve seen the most in my life was probably Menace II Society.”
“I know it sounds kind of cliché or something for me to say, oh, Menace II Society,” said Kanye, as the two chuckled, “but I’ve been really using the term emotionalism a lot recently, to describe the way I like to create, or the things I’m affected by, and maybe I made up my own definition of what that was, but there’s times where I thought, or people told me I was a minimalist. But I really tap into these things when I was fourteen, and the things that affected me, and kind of create from that point or what are the things that have flashed before your life if you’re about to die.”
Menace II Society is a gritty depiction of young people trapped in cycles of violence and poverty in Los Angeles. A coming-of-age, the film explores how trauma and environment impact destiny, and ultimately concludes in tragedy.
“You know, I want to create from that point the films or the songs or the moments in my life from that same time period, like twelve to through eighteen,” Kanye continued.