On Sept. 23, BBC Radio One began posting a series of snippets online from an interview that journalist Zane Lowe did with rapper Kanye West. For an hour, Kanye spoke about his life, his music, and himself. In the beginning of the interview, he expresses his frustrations with the industry.

“I make music, I can do it, but I shouldn’t be limited to only one place of creativity,” he said. He went on about his dreams and aspirations, but how no one is really letting him do they things he wants to do.

“You guys don’t understand that I’ve met with companies and they say ‘What we’re trying to figure out is how to control you,’” he said. Even though he’s collaborated with big brands such as Nike on his extremely successful sneakers, Nike Air Yeezy, he explained that Nike never called him to talk about doing something more.

Kanye West doesn’t just want to design sneakers or t-shirts, he wants to expand his creativity to other areas, specifically architecture and clothing design.

“What people don’t realize is, I wanna make uniforms for my high school basketball team,” he said. “Then I want to take that a step further and make uniforms for the entire city … I eventually want to be the force behind a billion-dollar company.” Kanye emphasized that he can’t do these things if companies aren’t willing to let him be himself.

So why can’t Kanye be himself? After all four parts of his interview with Zane Lowe was posted, news publications reported on the story by saying that it was Kanye’s “funniest interview” and referred to the hour-long chat as just another rant.

During the interview he said, “They classify my motivational speeches as rants — like ‘Why is he saying that? Why is he doing that?’” He predicted that the media would just brush off whatever he was saying as something that was unimportant and not worth listening to because he’s Kanye West and he always has something to say.

This is particularly confusing because the interview wasn’t a rant. It was an honest depiction of the man, musician and artist. Sure, some of his references and word choices were a little odd, but he was speaking honestly about his personal struggles with wanting to do something and being held back based on other’s perceptions of him. That’s a pretty relatable thing to speak in-depth about, yet it gets dismissed like its something unimportant.

A few days after the interview hit the web, Jimmy Kimmel decided to parody it. In the spoof, two children reenacted a part of the interview as West and Lowe. Before the spoof, he gave an intro that totally discredited West and everything he said by calling it “weird” and claiming that he might live on another planet in his head.

“Does Kanye West know you’re not supposed to be your own hype man?” Kimmel asked.

But why not? As a society, we’re accustomed to celebrities being humble about their talent, but I think the world needs more people like Kanye West. He knows his worth, he knows what he can do, and he won’t settle for anything less than what he thinks he deserves. I understand that everyone can’t adopt that frame of mind, but why do we ridicule people who know their value? Instead, we should be lifting these people up and confirming their beliefs, if what they believe is true.

If we ever want to see a change in the norm, we have to stop looking at artists as weird and let them create the change in the world.

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