Kanye West wants you to know he didn’t say what you think he said.
In an interview with The New York Times published Monday, West said people didn’t understand what he actually meant by his now-famous comment about slavery.
“I said the idea of sitting in something for 400 years sounds — sounds — like a choice to me, I never said it’s a choice,” West told the publication. “I never said slavery itself — like being shackled in chains — was a choice.”
West spoke with The Times over three days earlier this month while in Wyoming, a state he’s visited frequently since last year and where he both worked on and debuted his new album “Ye.”
Here’s more of what West shared in the interview:
West has considered suicide
The album opens with the single, “I Thought About Killing You.”
Some fans have wondered whether West meant he wanted to off his public persona, which also appears to be his personal one.
He said he’s considered it.
“Oh yeah, I’ve thought about killing myself all the time. It’s always a option and [expletive],” West said. “Like Louis C.K. said: I flip through the manual. I weigh all the options.”
West appears to be in a better place now, saying later in the interview, “I’m just having this epiphany now, ’cause I didn’t do it, but I did think it all the way through. But if I didn’t think it all the way through, then it’s actually maybe more of a chance of it happening.”
His wife summoned Tony Robbins to help
West said his wife, Kim Kardashian West, engaged life coach Tony Robbins to talk to him after all the upheaval, which included the musician’s erratic behavior and a hospitalization.
“He could look at me and you know, I don’t know why he mentioned suicide, but he could tell that I was very low,” West said. “Really medicated, shoulders slumped down, and my confidence was gone, which is a lot of the root of my superpower, because if you truly have self-confidence, no one can say anything to you.”
Robbins instructed West to go into a warrior pose and scream.
“I was so self-conscious about the nanny and the housekeeper that I didn’t want them to hear me screaming in the living room,” West said. “I think that that’s such a metaphor of something for the existence of so-called well-off people that they’re not really well-off — they won’t even scream in their own house.”
But he did scream and it helped, according to West.
West doesn’t agree with all of Trump’s policies but
West’s vocal support for President Donald Trump has angered some in his fan base.
From wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat to saying that they both share “dragon energy,” West has not shied away from linking himself with Trump.
And while he told The Times he doesn’t agree with all of Trump’s policies, West said he is determined to have his own opinion and doesn’t feel pressure to speak for African Americans as a whole.
“Having a political opinion that’s overly informed, it’s like knowing how to dress, as opposed to being a child — ‘I like this,’ ” he said. “I hear Trump talk and I’m like, I like the way it sounds, knowing that there’s people who like me that don’t like the way it sounds.”
West used more than one child analogy in the interview.
“We need to be able to be in situations where you can be irresponsible,” he said. “That’s one of the great privileges of an artist. An artist should be irresponsible in a way — a 3-year-old.”
He wondered if his wife would leave him
The track “Wouldn’t Leave” on the “Ye” album speaks to how tense things may have been in the Kardashian-West marriage after the TMZ slavery comment controversy.
He told The New York Times it raised concern.
“There was a moment where I felt like after TMZ, maybe a week after that, I felt like the energy levels were low, and I called different family members and was asking, you know, ‘Was Kim thinking about leaving me after TMZ?’” he said. “So that was a real conversation.”