Kanye West Reveals Unexpected Musical Inspiration From Famed Self-Help Guru
Kanye West has revealed to The New York Times that he had another muse in his mind when creating Ye, his latest body of work, and this time it was not Kim Kardashian.
In a piece published today, July 3, by the newspaper, reporters apparently shadowed West during his time in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, directly prior, during, and after the release of his new album. Through these interactions, it has come to light that West apparently saw a muse in celebrity self-help guru and billionaire Tony Robbins.
On an afternoon early last year, West reportedly returned to his California home to find the well-known guru sitting in his living room at the request of his wife, Kim. Only months after his erratic outbursts at concerts, a stint in the hospital, and Kardashian’s highly publicized robbery in Paris, the artist was in a mental slump of sorts, and his reality star wife sought out the most well-known name in the game to aid West in getting back to his old self.
The celebrity self-helper led the “Yikes” artist on his famed cycle of positive affirmations. Amongst those instructions were ones to reach a warrior pose and scream.
“I was so self-conscious about the nanny and the housekeeper that I didn’t want them to hear me screaming in the living room,” Kanye said. “I think that that’s such a metaphor of something for the existence of so-called well-off people that they’re not really well-off — they won’t even scream in their own house.”
However through these interactions, West was able to learn plenty about himself, as well as to help him recenter his mind to focus only on what he was striving for. The artist took so much from the encounter that he even now blatantly cites Robbins as the catalyst for how he now delivers his messages through music.
This is clearly not a stretch to draw parallels to, as songs such as “I Thought About Killing You,” “Yikes,” and “Ghost Town” all reflect the delivery of Robbin’s self-affirmations at his shows. The open proclamation of suicide and contemplating murder on “I Thought About Killing You” directly correlates with one of Robbin’s core principals of identifying and sharing your deepest issues. The spoken realizations of West’s mental disorders and repurposing them as a “superpower” is also reminiscent of Robbins teachings. Followed then by the more loudly proclaimed ideologies found on “Ghost Town,” another instance where Robbin’s method of sharing your issues or lack thereof with great intensity supposedly helps cure you of them.
