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" A Kanye rant is a wondrous thing to behold. It&amp;#039;s so much more than a rant. He doesn&amp;#039;t just start yelling; he builds, slowly, hopping from one tangent to another and making connections you could never have seen coming. He punctuates his rants with Auto-Tuned sing-speak. They&amp;#039;re like bonus tracks for everyone who cared enough to spend $100 to see him live. At last night&amp;#039;s Yeezus show at Madison Square Garden, his last on the tour in New York City, he unleashed an exhausting rant. It was just about enough to ruin the good vibes of everyone there, though not quite. He had evidently seen Hunger Games: Catching Fire with the family, and it affected him. He compared himself to Lenny Kravitz in the film, saying Kravitz is the &amp;quot;original n***a in Paris&amp;quot; (and apparently has a great apartment there, which in Kanye&amp;#039;s world is a fact everyone knows). &amp;quot;There would be no Kanye if it weren&amp;#039;t for Lenny Kravitz,&amp;quot; he said, which is hard to argue with. Without Lenny rocking out in front of an American flag in the &amp;quot;American Woman&amp;quot; video, is there any &amp;quot;Otis&amp;quot;? Then the monologue got uglier. Kanye complimented Kravitz&amp;#039;s great taste and his designs. When Kanye tried his hand at fashion design, he said, a lot of industry types told him, &amp;quot;Lenny tried to do the same thing.&amp;quot; Apparently Mr. West is only the latest music artist to be denied his ambitions of sending Louis Vuitton down the runway. That company, Kanye says, stopped selling his clothes even after they sold out. But Kanye refuses to be put in whatever trap he sees Kravitz in. &amp;quot;I wish I could be liked like Lenny Kravitz,&amp;quot; he said (obvious bullshit). Kanye continued moping about his stalled fashion career before disavowing his relationship with the industry completely. &amp;quot;Fuck fashion. I care about talent.&amp;quot; Kanye cares so much that sometimes it&amp;#039;s actually painful to hear him talk about it. That&amp;#039;s especially true when he&amp;#039;s complaining about the kinds of problems most of us can&amp;#039;t fathom. One wonders if Marc Jacobs ever had dreams of releasing a single, or if Lenny Kravitz really sees himself as a failure for transitioning from pop star to mainstream character actor and occasional designer. When he&amp;#039;s talking about his own ambitions, Kanye has a way of insulting the people around him, which was the most unfortunate thing about last night&amp;#039;s show. In addition to inadvertently knocking Kravitz, he said &amp;quot;no disrespect to Dr. Dre&amp;quot; while clearly disrespecting Dre&amp;#039;s line of headphones, which Kanye would never, ever do, he wants to make clear. Kanye is above all that. He&amp;#039;s no sellout. He&amp;#039;s a genius. And a jackass. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a26168/kanye-west-hates-fashion/>