IT was trademark Kanye West petulance. Late last year at the MTV Europe Music Awards, his clip for “Touch the Sky” lost the award for video of the year to “We Are Your Friends,” by the electronic musicians Justice vs. Simian. As So Me, the director of the winning video, was accepting the award, Mr. West, the multiplatinum rapper-producer, jumped onstage and interrupted him.
Kanye West’s new album, “Graduation,” scheduled for release on Sept. 11, draws on a wide range of influences, including classic rock and dance music.
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“Hell, no!” Mr. West shouted. He boasted that his video cost $1 million and ranted, “If I don’t win, your awards show loses credibility.”
Mr. West had long had a reputation as a venter, a performer whose public persona was refreshingly unchecked. When he proclaimed that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on a telethon after Hurricane Katrina, he helped galvanize the hip-hop world. This MTV outburst, though, came off like the gripes of a typical egotist. Suddenly he seemed like a blowhard, an ingrate. His outburst was posted on YouTube and widely mocked.
“A complete momentum killer” is how Mr. West sheepishly described the incident one recent evening as he relaxed at Chung King Studios in New York, where he was finishing his third album, “Graduation,” due Sept. 11 on Def Jam Records. Kicking off a pair of silver Yves Saint Laurent high-top sneakers, he compared himself to a giant stomping on “the people’s champ.” The day after the awards, he said, he holed up in his hotel room, chastened, ruminating over the bad press. “It was like I had killed somebody,” he said.
It was one in a series of regrettable events and choices that brought out the relentless self-questioner in him. Mr. West, 30, began to re-examine every aspect of his career, from his music to his image to his fashion sense. “Certain ways that I approached things, I could have done it with more tact and more class,” he said.
In part “Graduation” is the product of those efforts. It is his most eclectic album, drawing on a wide musical palette, including classic rock and dance music. And these musical shifts coincide with Mr. West’s developing his interests in other areas. He nods to hipster culture with an album cover designed by the Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and an alternate video for “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” starring the alternative comedian Zach Galifianakis, who filmed it at his North Carolina farm after he was personally solicited by Mr. West. Mr. Galifianakis lip-syncs to the song as he drives a tractor, accompanied by the indie-rocker Will Oldham and a troupe of clog dancers.
“He likes branching out and doing these odd things with his music,” said Mr. Galifianakis, who added that he tried to connect Mr. West and Mr. Oldham to discuss a potential collaboration. “It also expands his reach a bit.”
Mr. West is no longer just concerned with being popular; he also wants to be cool. But given the double-digit decline in rap sales this year and Mr. West’s status as one of few bankable hip-hop superstars, it’s a potentially risky time to be broadening, or diluting, his palette. Rap loyalists may blanch at his new directions, but Mr. West has never been solely beholden to rap fans or to rap modes of thought. While other hip-hop stars (50 Cent, Timbaland) have been flirting lately with pop collaborations to extend their brands, Mr. West has succeeded in large part by imposing his ornate style of hip-hop onto the mainstream.
And sometimes on rap fans as well. His current single, “Stronger,” which samples the innovative French D.J. duo Daft Punk, has been well received. “For hip-hop stations that actually play some progressive hip-hop, this is a good thing for the genre,” said Ebro Darden, program director of Hot 97, the New York FM radio station, of Mr. West’s sometimes unconventional reference points.
A native of Chicago, Mr. West emerged on the hip-hop scene six years ago as a traditionalist producer, resurrecting the dusty sounds of early 1990s New York-style rap and polishing them to a pop sheen. But while clearly steeped in hip-hop’s sonic traditions, he was an outsider to its lyrical ones, rapping on “The College Dropout,” his 2004 debut, about higher education, class struggle and his own self-doubts in ways particular to his middle-class upbringing. (His mother was a college professor, his father a photojournalist.) The result was a success with both hip-hop’s mainstream and its alternative (or “backpacker”) wing. (Mr. West wore a backpack, but it was by Louis Vuitton.) “Late Registration,” his follow-up from 2005, tackled similar subject matter and was more musically adventurous and ostentatious.
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