Kanye West

He even has ideas in mind for a video involving CGI panda bears and a sequence requiring him to take dance lessons. “Can I please be Kanye for one video and just yell at people for not being dope enough?,” he jokes.

What was it like working with Kanye?

Kanye is a genius whose only intent is to punch his fist into that creative “other side” and pull something massive out. And he does.

All we do as artists is pretend we have a song and the song we come up with is our fake pretend thing about of what our dreams are based on so yeah it's make-believe man we're going into a room going today I'm going to pretend I have this. Kanye is like the greatest sniper I've ever met. He has more confirmed kills than anyone else in terms of going into a room and going, Today it shall be this. Now and I'll leave you here in terms of the the dividing line between talking about the art and time but the rest of it that is intoxicating and sometimes toxic in terms of—

Complex: We see the behavior of some of the biggest creators of our generation. People who you’ve both worked with—Kanye—you see what’s happening. We see people going off the rails on social media. Do you guys sympathize with that kind of behavior?

JM: That’s a great question, and that’s a great word, sympathize. Yeah, I sympathize. I look at it very differently, though. What happens when you decide to make an invention of yourself? Artists have always been inventions, right? We decide, “Oh, I think I’m gonna be that.” Some people go, “I think I’m gonna make all of this that. I think I’m gonna move all of my chips into the idea of this living invention.” And you can lose yourself in the invention. So I don’t even begin to look at this like “crazy” or off the rails. I don’t really have the data to; I don’t think anybody really does. But I can tell you for sure that a component of it is being at your own steering wheel for so many years as a creative god and not knowing how to say, “Well, now I’m a guy.” We’ve hung, and I was always astounded by Kanye’s ability to donate most of who he is to that invention. The problem is I’ve never seen anybody successfully live inside of the giant robot that you’ve built for many, many years. I just feel like I agreed with the universe when I first met Kanye that I was never just gonna beat on the guy, because I saw a genius. I think a lot of people have. But it just goes to show you that even if you are a genius, you’re still just a dude inside of the bigger metallic version of yourself going, “What does this button do?” And if you don’t check in with someone else to tell you maybe step down from that, you just burn into it. Ultimately, what he’s saying is the same thing every artist wants to say, which is to break free of expectation. Artists have been doing this for hundreds of years, responding to the world, finding out what in the world is hypocritical, what in the world is confining you. I think he’s trying to break through these walls. And everybody has a different way of doing that, and he just invented a larger “Hulk smash” of it all and also didn’t build in a fail-safe, which is someone throwing you into a car and saying get out of here. If you don’t have the boss to tell you…

JM: That’s a great point. We are all Kanye apologists to an extent that we do not offer to anyone in our personal life […] [Laughs] There’s nobody who gets as many chances in our own personal life, which is really interesting. We used to give our respect to people and our admiration to people on a provisional basis, meaning it can be taken away if you behave a certain way. We’ve seen now that… It’s no secret there’s a president that can do no wrong by those who’ve decided he’s their guy. Kanye can do no wrong if you’ve decided he’s your guy. You’ll just change the qualifications because it’s very unpleasant to scrub someone off your list. It’s very unpleasant to say “I was wrong” or “I changed my mind” or “not anymore.” Look how hard it was to change our mind about Bill Cosby. It was the hardest thing to go, “I don’t wanna move you to another category.”