8 Wonderous Analogies Kanye West Crafted In His Interview With Clique TV

In a new interview with France's Clique TV, Kanye West touches on many of his usual talking points—race, class, fashion, pushing boundaries, corporations, Drake, the state of pop music, the quality of North West's toys, and so on—and, as ever, everything he says is worth listening to. What struck us when we were watching this interview, however, was the elaborate analogies he deploys to articulate some of his more complex (and some not so complex) points. Below are our favorites.

Learning to make hits as archery practice:

"Okay, I can hit everything with a clean arrow, let me weight it at the top. And then if you do, you have to lean back a little bit. So Yeezus might not have been the greatest success but it's like a person that can hit ten in a row, hit a thousand in a row. Let me weight it, so I can learn how to do this because I might be in a situation where we're at some type of war and I'm not going to have enough arrows to do the luxury of what I'm doing now. So let me do this, so I can do that. And then I weight it at the back, and let me figure out how to hit that. And through Yeezus comes 'All Day,' comes 'Only One.'"

His Work ethic as Micheal Jordan's workouts:

"I've grown, I went to the gym like Michael Jordan like when he was going to win his championships and everything. He had to get stronger to go up against the Pistons, and things like that. We're going up against major hit makers and stuff."

Drake as a sparring partner:

"I look at Drake as an amazing sparring partner. Like somebody who's like, come on man, get back up. Wassup bro, what you doing? Because I was sitting there getting fat, just knocked everybody out. And then this guy hits the gym and he's like, running around, fourteen hits, same as Paul McCartney....that's where you're getting these records from."

Racism as two cats and a bouncing ball and nineteenth century fashion:

"Racism is a dated concept. It's a silly concept that people touch on to try to separate, to alienate, to pinpoint anything. It's stupid. It's like a bouncing ball in a room with two cats or something. When you don't feel like playing the cat you throw the bouncing ball and let literally them fight over the bouncing ball, and the bouncing ball has nothing, no purpose, anything other than it bounces. That's racism. It's not an actual thing that even means anything, it's something that was used to hold people back in the past, but now there have been so many leaps, it's played out like a style from the eighteen hundreds or something."

Acceptance as the path home:

"When I deliver a Christian view I say, hey I'm not trying to force this on you, this isn't the Crusades, I'm just going to try to tell you that this is my opinion and this is how I think. I think everyone has a way to think, people have different ways to count their steps to get back to their home. If they're like, ten miles away, somebody might take this path and somebody might take another path. I'm not saying any path is wrong, but you can't condemn the person that takes the other path. You can chose your own path in life but we have to be accepting of each other as one race. We're all family, like distant cousins."

"New Slaves" as North West's new toy wolves stolen away from her:

"I was complaining about a lot of the toys that my daughter has, like, these toys don't have enough qualities, soul, life, energy in them. And then Vanessa Beecroft brought her these wolves that were very lifelike and had so much creativity put into the way they were made, and when my daughter saw them she started screaming and running around and it was the happiest I'd ever seen her. It was three wolves and that level of joy, it feels like everything we're doing in life, we're trying to get that moment back. It feels like everything we're doing in life, we're trying to get that moment back....but, you don't. You realize that somehow joy had been stolen from you, someone grabbed those wolves when you were really young, and packaged them in all the needs of society and said don't open for another twenty years and when you finally get back to those wolves, it costs so much to open them up. You have to pay all your college loans off, all your debts to society, to finally open that wolf package back up again. And it just doesn't feel like the same amount of joy that my daughter had at that point."

The current state of fashion as tech support bars:

"[Rue Saint-Honoré, a busy shopping street in Paris,] reminds me of the computer stores [I would go to] when I was in seventh grade and I wanted to design video games. It was really, really busy and hard to understand. They had this floppy disc and this PC, and I remember whenever you had a computer that messed up, they had a fat computer guy who came over and took your motherboard and he brought it back and it's always never worked and you try to get on the internet and it's really slow, and he's like, what are you even looking up on the internet? And it's black screen with the green words and maybe there'll be a video game on there—and it's like, why are you even on a computer period? That time is where fashion is currently, and I drive down that street and I know I'm going to change how difficult it is to get dressed."

Life as a long movie:

"Life is a long movie, everyday isn't a defined episode. This isn't a tv show, this isn't a commercial, this is a lifetime. So in this lifetime we'll see this journey of a man growing, learning to communicate, and realizing what he can do with his message."

Lead photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images