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Kanye West was the only guest on Wednesday night’s installment of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in the extended appearance, Kanye not only made good with Jimmy Kimmel over their one-sided Twitter rant, he re-established that he’s a misunderstood genius.
You’ll recall that a Kimmel skit spoofing a Kanye interview to a British reporter two weeks ago kicked off the situation, which began with an angry phone call from West to the talk show host, and then escalated to West flaming Kimmel on Twitter.
Before Kanye came out Wednesday night, Kimmel explained, “The only other time I was ever involved in a rap feud of this magnitude was in 1992, when I accused Sir Mix-a-Lot of only liking medium butts…That turned out to be my bad.”
When Kanye did finally come out to meet Kimmel, the pair hugged, though the exchange began as decidedly tense. The recording artist explained Kimmel’s skit hit home because unlike tabloid writers or paparazzi, Kimmel knew West, and knew he was an OK guy. “When I saw the skit — which I didn’t watch all the way through, because I didn’t wanna be infuriated,” Kanye admitted, “I said, ‘Well, I know you…And so a combination of me knowing you and me not knowing the person who put a bad headline on the cover of In Touch, and me not knowing this person. And I was like, “Well, this is the one person I know!” Kimmel agreed, saying, “[A] lot of people think you’re a jerk, and I often in my own personal conversations say, ‘No, I know this guy, he is not a jerk!”
However, the phone call between the pair made things worse, West said. “You know, it kinda just went and kinda just elevated from a call we just had as men — and you know, that, that elevates sometimes…and…we took it back to high school a little bit.” Kimmel interjected with, “I got beat up a lot in high school…So I didn’t wanna go back to high school.”
The good news is, Kanye and Kimmel appear to have worked things out, which allowed Kanye to do what he tends to do best: wax eloquent about himself, “I’m a creative genius, and there’s no other way to say it. I know you’re not supposed to say that about yourself…[but]…For me to say I wasn’t a genius, I would be lying to you and to myself.”
From there, West jumped from topic to topic, ranting how the world of fashion didn’t take him seriously despite his “dedicating his life” to the industry, to how the Hollywood Walk of Fame was wrong to speak of a reality show star ban — “People are so, so, dated…There’s no way [partner] Kim Kardashian shouldn’t have a star” — to his hopes he can emulate the impact made by those heroes to whom he compares himself, among them Jesus, Leonardo Da Vinci, and NBA Commissioner David Stern.
West ran on so long that the musical guest for the evening, Arctic Monkeys, was bumped.
