Kanye West presumably already had crazy ideas before he was rich and world-famous.
Now he’s very rich and very world-famous, however, he definitely has crazy ideas. And they emerge at a rapid rate.
Kanye’s latest idea – following, you know, the “moving portrait”, the plane takeover, the Facebook takeover, the Grammys invasion, seven-screen film installation Cruel Summer, the multiple Twitter confessionals and the rest of it – is that he wants to work on amusement parks. Oh, and even scarier? He wants to work on cities too.
Speaking to GQ at the Cannes Film Festival, Kanye claimed that “post-Grammys”, he intends to “work on cities”. “I want to work on amusement parks, I want to change entertainment experiences or life. Something like if McQueen or Tarsem [Singh] was to meet the entertainment value of a Cirque du Soleil or a Walt Disney. With the DONDA company, this is our first installation.” DONDA is, of course, Kanye’s new design company. We’re not sure what it actually does, and we’re not sure Kanye does either, but none of that matters when you’re world-famous and rich.
In the same piece, GQ report on Cruel Summer, Kanye’s seven-screen film-cum-installation, which stars Kid Cudi and premiered at Cannes this week. At one point, Cudi and Kanye engage in a “Tarantino-style pop-culture debate”, where Kanye asks Cudi, ‘Who do you like better, Prince or Michael Jordan?’. Cudi replies, ‘That doesn’t even make sense man—that’s like asking, ‘Cake or Steak?’
It gets better, apparently “After bickering, they jump into Lamborghinis and shoot down the streets of Doha to a remix of West’s recent single “Mercy.” Then the soundtrack downshifts into a remix of Salem’s “I’m Still in the Night” as the film becomes more of a mythic romance, replete with Arabic architecture, desert vistas, and flowing fabrics. In the story, Kid Cudi stars as a car thief who loves a blind Arabian princess. The thief is expelled from her palace, and then her father tells him that he may marry the princess if he can help her see again. Cudi’s thief takes the guide strings arrayed around the palace to help her find her way and plays music, hoping that the sounds will help her see.”
In the kingdom of the blind, and all that.