Kanye Omari West, or as others like myself like to call him, Yeezus has been the talk of the nation for quite some time now. There has been so much hype and buzz around his name. Now for over 10 years Mr. West has turned himself into a household name, but the more famous that he gets and the more success that he has, the more people have negative comments and opinions to say about him.

Over the past year, people, like myself, are wearing “Kanye 2020” hats and concert tees from years ago have been waiting for just about anything new to drop that has Kanye’s name on it. From overpriced clothes with holes in them to shoes that have sold out faster than I can refresh the page. People like us are constantly looking for something new, we countdown the hours for GOOD Friday Music to drop and are wondering when the infamous “SWISH” album will finally release. The question is why do people like us have such a deep attraction for Mr. West, why do we look up to him so much?

Yeezy is not famous for the reasons I wish he were famous for but for rather the persona he has created for himself. Ever since the MTV Video Music Awards and the Taylor Swift incident it seems like everyone is waiting for Kanye to prove himself and his actions, such as fighting with the paparazzi, to the world. Yet no one can see how extraordinary his music is and just seem to focus on how much West is a self-important asshole married to an even more self-important “business” woman, Kim Kardashian. Kanye once said in a BBC Interview, “if you are a fan of Kanye West, you are a fan of yourself.” It took me forever to try and analyze what he was really saying and how any of that made sense but then one day it finally came to me.

Kanye West is arrogant, he is full of himself, he considers himself God-like. He compares himself to some of the greatest contributors of the world such as the late Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey and the thing is he has every right to do that. If we look at the bigger picture and really focus on the image that Kanye wants to portray he does it for the future of our nation and the world. The quote comes from believing in ourselves. In every interview, every telecasted performance and all the rants in his concerts Kanye’s main focus is that he does not care about what anyone else has to say about him, he does what makes him happy and lives his life catered that way. The thing about today's day and age is that we need to have confidence in ourselves to reach our goals, we need to be cocky, to a certain extent, we need to believe that we have the ability and more importantly, the potential to turn our dreams into reality, so that begs the question, is Kanye really the bad guy when he promotes himself in that same way?

Realistically as an African-American Kanye's stereotypical future is to end up drug dealing and behind bars, right? Well with the confidence he has in himself he dropped out of college and pursued his love in producing and that worked out for him. Then, he chased after his dream to become a rapper and succeeded at that too, even after hip-hop stars warned him against trying to rap. Mr. West not only became a famous rapper he is an award winning rapper that has been able to create albums and overall change the music industry. Creating albums from different stages in his life such as car crash that wired his mouth shut, the death of his mother, the endings to different relationships and the beginning of others; Kanye manifested all of those events and made music with them all the while being ahead of the music industry. He used technology and his artistic mind to break the standard. Through all of that he still managed to have time to start his own Record Label "GOOD Music." It seemed like there was nothing that Kanye couldn't do, and then he broke the standard yet again. He has now signed with Adidas and created his own fashion line with new seasonal collections dropping every few months, he has even won the Shoe-of-the-Year award, so yes, there is nothing Kanye cannot do if he continues to have the mentality that he currently has.

After being told no, Kanye thrived off of it. He uses that to fuel to be better, do better. "I could let these dream killers kill my self-esteem, or use my arrogance as a steam to power my dreams." In actuality Kanye is what we should all strive to be, not as extreme, we need to be our own motivators. Kanye focuses on how people will always try to bring you down and want you to fail, and we need to prove them wrong. When we start our mornings and chant positive sayings and caption our Instagram pictures with inspirational quotes we should be using Kanye lyrics. "I refuse to accept other people's ideas of happiness for me, as if there's a 'one size fits all' standard for happiness." To me that seems accurate, Kanye promotes freedom of self expression, he believes that the future, our generation has the ability to achieve so much and change the world but we must have faith in ourselves that we can do that, we can be that change. Maybe we should listen to more "arrogant" ghetto rap music West has created for us, after all SWISH is soon to drop, Yeezy Season is approaching, and maybe new lyrics can change us more than we think, all it takes is one line to do it all.

This "pretentious a**hole" wants us to be a fan of ourselves, so when he says he feels like Deepak Chopra maybe those inspirational audio books are just his albums. Personal inspiration, I think so. YeezyTaughtMe, Yeezy taught me that the world is my own and I can do with that whatever it is that I want and make my life ambitions real.