Kanye West in His Own Words for the 2015 "American Dream" Issue of 'PAPER'

Kanye West appears on the cover of the latest issue of PAPER, one that asks featured artists and designers how they define, redefine or even subvert the “American Dream” ideals. Never one to confine himself to any box, Kanye instead focuses on his “world dream” in the personally curated cover story, which sees Kanye’s words paired with the photography of Jackie Nickerson. A brief excerpt of the piece appears below while the article can be read in its entirety over at PAPER‘s website. The magazine’s “American Dream” issue is now available online for $10 USD.

I know people want to talk about the American Dream, but my dream is a world dream. It’s a world in which everyone’s main goal would be to help each other. The first thing I told my team on New Year’s Day was, “You know, people say bad news travels fast, but this year let’s make good news travel faster.” You get back what you put out, and the more positive energy you put out, the more positive energy you’ll get back. We had to do a lot of fighting in the past couple of years to get people to understand what we want to do, what we will do and what we’re capable of doing. Not just me — or my DONDA creative team, or my design team, or my music team — but an entire generation that has the information highway and the ability to access information. Information is not only power; it’s simply everything. It can be a scary thing for people to think universally, to think in terms of the world. It’s not traditional. There’s a lot of people who want to make sure things don’t become a hybrid, but the Internet has opened up every conversation, literally and metaphorically. It starts as homogenizing, but this hybrid-ing, this interbreeding of ideas, is necessary for us as a race to evolve. (Thank God for Steve Jobs.) For example, there was an embroiderer at a fashion house who was in her 90s and she refused to give anyone her technique. She said, “When I die, this technique will die also.” I think the opposite of that. I think it’s so important for me, as an artist, to give Drake as much information as I can, A$AP, Kendrick, Taylor Swift, any of these younger artists as much information as I can to make better music in the future. We should all be trying to make something that’s better. It’s funny that I worked at the Gap in high school, because in my past 15 years it seems like that’s the place I stood in my creative path — to be the gap, the bridge.