Watch The Throne

I had just finished school when I downloaded it. I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to have one of those days that fixes itself in you — the kind you can still walk through years later, room by room.

I pressed play on “Otis” first. And something in my chest moved. It was new. Not new like a good song is new — new like a door I didn’t know was there. Otis Redding chopped up and thrown under two men flexing on a sawed-off Maybach, and it didn’t sound like theft, it sounded like claiming. I went to “Niggas in Paris” next and I sat there stunned. I had never heard anything like it. Not from them, not from anyone.

This wasn’t My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I loved that album, but I knew the difference the moment I heard this one. Dark Fantasy was Kanye going inward, building a cathedral out of his own wreckage. The Throne was something else. This was him turning outward and telling the whole world: I made the greatest album already, and now I’m going to show you how you make the greatest rap album of all time — and I’m going to do it standing next to the man who was my idol for so long, Jay-Z, and I’m going to stand taller. Not braggadocio for its own sake. A statement of intent. Just give me the platform. Give me your worst. Watch what I do with it.

That’s what made Kanye great to me, and it still does. Not the talent alone — plenty of people have talent. It’s the appetite. The need to prove it, to take the hate you’d hand him and burn it as fuel. He doesn’t strive to be among the best. He wants to be the best, and he treats that like the floor, not the ceiling. Big Sean once described the way Kanye still grinds like he has something to prove, like a new artist with no name yet. That’s the thing most people never understand about him. The hunger never got fed.

But here’s the part I actually came to write about, the part I think people miss when they argue about him: what makes Kanye great is that he makes everyone around him greater.

He doesn’t collaborate to share the load. He collaborates to extract — to pull out of people the best work they have in them, sometimes better than they knew they had. Look at the run that led into the Throne. On Dark Fantasy he got a verse out of Nicki Minaj on “Monster” that, sixteen years later, she still hasn’t topped. Sixteen years. He got a performance out of Rick Ross on “Devil in a New Dress” that is one of the finest rap verses ever committed to tape, and Ross will tell you himself Kanye pushed him to it. That’s not luck. That’s a man who builds the room, sets the temperature, and conducts.

And Jay-Z said it plainly. When they were making the Throne, the two of them yelled at each other in the studio, threw the whole thing out and rebuilt it more than once. Jay said the fighting was the point — that they pushed each other to be greater, and that the people who have a problem with that are the ones who are complacent, who don’t like being pushed. That is the entire philosophy in one sentence. Greatness isn’t comfortable. It isn’t polite. It’s two people who refuse to let the other one coast.

Then there was Virgil.

I could listen to Virgil talk forever. He understood something about this that most musicians never do — that the visual isn’t decoration, it’s part of the art, as essential as the sound. The Throne’s whole world, the gilded cover, the film of it, the look of two men crowning themselves — that was Virgil making the image as striking as the music, one of one, whether people got it or not. And they didn’t always get it. That was the point. You are not going to be liked for pushing past what people thought was possible for you, or for them. You do it anyway. You make the thing so undeniable it stops mattering whether they approve.

Because that’s what The Throne actually was. Two Black men whose ancestors were somebody’s property, standing on the biggest stage in the world, staring the system that once owned them dead in the face and saying: watch the throne, bitch. Watch me take it. Not asking for a seat. Building the seat, gilding it, and daring you to look away. That’s not looking capitalism in the face from the outside — that’s grabbing its own tools and out-shining everything it ever told you that you couldn’t have.

That album raised me. I mean that. I was a kid who had just finished school, and it taught me that anything was possible — that you could come from nothing and make something humanity would have to reckon with. It taught me to want to be around the best people I can find, because that’s the only way you become the best version of yourself. It taught me the difference between wanting to be good and needing to be great.

I think about where Kanye was through all of it, up through Donda — a man who kept finding new ways to express exactly what he was living, whatever it was, however it came out. Messy, difficult, brilliant. And I look at that and I don’t flinch from it, I aspire to it. I want to build the kind of life where I’m in that position — free enough, secured enough, surrounded by the right minds, to make whatever I need to make. That’s on my vision board. Not the money. The freedom to be that relentless.

“‘I am in the pursuit of awesomeness. Excellence is the bare minimum.’ — Kanye West, Watch the Throne documentary.”

Watch The Throne.