If you read this paragraph about Kanye West from today’s Observer and don’t do a double take, you have fewer preconceptions than I.
An only child (‘Kanye’ is an Ethiopian name which means ‘the only
one’), whose parents split before he was a year old and who divorced
when he was four, Kanye was mainly raised by his doting mother, Donda.
They are still extremely close; he wrote a song for her on his last
album, ‘Hey Mama’, which, sweetly, she now has as the ringtone on her
cellphone. When Kanye was still a young child, they moved from Atlanta,
Georgia, to Chicago, where she became the chair of the English
department at Chicago State University before latterly taking over as
his manager.
The best part of the whole article is the quote from his mom at the very end:
‘When he was 12 or 13 I caught him primping in the mirror one day. He turned and said, “Mom, look at me! I could be a teenage sex symbol!” He was serious. It used to tickle me, him looking at himself in the mirror. And Kanye did become that sex symbol. You have to be able to see yourself; you have to be able to see it when no-one else can see it. You have to visualize where you want it to be and claim it. Kanye claimed it a long time ago. Those countless hours in his room, the years of preparation, prepared him for when his vision finally came to fruition.’
Gotta go. Time to beat feet to the nearest mirror for some serious, quality time.