Why You Should Be More Like Kanye West
Matthew AI argues that creators limit themselves by staying within audience expectations. He uses Kanye West's album evolution from The College Dropout through Yeezus as proof that reinvention, even when it invites backlash, builds greater influence and respect. The practical move: deliberately try new topics and tones, treat life as social experiments, and accept criticism as a sign you're actually changing.
Chapters
The other week we shot a video standing next to a wall, analysing what we thought about some graffiti that had appeared overnight. We didn't know whether originally we were going to put out this video because it was a spontaneous sort of rant about nothing, but we ended up doing it. I thought we'd start today's video by reading out some of the comments. Paula says, I am meh about this video blog. It had some funny moments but mainly seemed to ramble on. could have been edited down to two minutes. It's your fault, isn't it, Jameson? Rivka says, It's not even good graffiti. I've seen graffiti that is impressive that must have taken some skill. This is not it. My point is it's still sort of someone's wall somewhere. Do you know what I mean? Someone still has to clean it and clean up after someone else's mess. And it just because you call it art, it doesn't mean the person... If you come and draw art on my left butt cheek, It doesn't mean I wanted art there. It just, you've just come and vandalized my ass. Linda says, Even though I typically agree with your opinions and everything, and it must have been annoying to see the damage of property for such a useless scribble, I'd prefer it if you kept on track with your insight to men, women and relationships. Just saying... dot dot dot... dot dot dot dot dot... you only need three dots for an ellipsis. I would say that Matt is showing by example how to be an interesting man or woman. I prefer man. I wish you'd have more of an open understanding, anthropological, sociopolitical, historical, artistic of teenagers, pop culture, tag culture, poverty, graffiti art, etc. Your point of view is so ordinary. I wish people with a lot of influence, like you, would try to open others eyes to new perspectives instead of reinforcing everyone's common prejudices. It's actually a really articulate, well-made point. I do have a lot of influence. Emma says, Matt, you need to pull it together. Too many of your videos recently have been about irrelevant shit. We enjoy your shit, but in moderation. These were probably 1% of the comments that I got on this video. The majority of comments were overwhelmingly positive and excited and lovely and all of those things. But it's interesting to me. I didn't know exactly how it would be received, but I knew that it had the potential to be received differently from the normal videos that we do. See, normally me and Jameson would sit here in my apartment and we would do a video about something. Three tips to get a date, five tips to text a guy, six ways to build a great love life, whatever. That's a very easy way for me to get validation and give value. This video forced me to both get validation and give value in a completely different way. It forced me to entertain, not from a place of having tons of tips to give away, but from a place of just saying, I'm going to comment on this thing. Sometimes what is, what is interesting about content is merely the passion of the opinion that's involved, that you take a stance on something. And I think many of us don't take stances on things. Of course, the reason we don't is because we're afraid of comments like these ones. It's very easy to focus on comments like these ones when we take a stance on something. I like testing audiences to see how they react to things. How would people on YouTube react if I did something a bit different? How would people on my blog react? How would people on Facebook and Twitter react? Would they enjoy it? Would they take it for what it was, just a fun Sunday video? Or would they get annoyed and say, this isn't like the stuff that you normally do. By the way, I think we should all do that in our daily lives as well. not be confined to one thing, but try and test our audience and the people around us to see what happens when we try different things within our personality. When we are going about our lives, we have this very strong desire to stay within the limits of what other people expect of us. If we've been funny for a long time, we expect, people expect us to be funny, to laugh, to make them laugh, and so on. If we're someone who always speaks intellectually and always has a very intellectual point to make, we feel the pressure to be intellectual at all times. but many of us don't give ourselves the space to maneuver with our personality and to do things differently to what we normally do. Jameson and I have actually had quite a strategic mission in the last year to not just do love life videos, to not just do three tips for this and five tips for that, but to do things that are a little more out there that take a little bit more of a risk. I think it's important to take risks with your personality. We often don't associate taking risks with our personality. What I mean by is take risk to try out a different part of yourself that may initially come off as weird, awkward, embarrassing. Very often when that happens you know that in some way you're doing something right. I always think how boring to wake up every day of your life and decide that you want to have the same look with your clothes. And I see personalities being the same way. As much as I don't want to wear the same clothes every day, I also don't want to have the same personality in every hour of my life, I want to be able to evolve and adapt and test the limits of who I can be. We did a video, for example, like Brano. Brano, if you didn't see it, was a video where we took a word that we thought was funny, this idea of Brano, which sounds like a dirty word, but actually was used to describe smart conversation. And when you feel like you've really connected with someone on an intellectual cerebral level, it was a joke piece that had the ability to offend people. And we didn't know how it would go down. But what we also knew is that it would change people's expectations of what they thought we were all about and what they expected from us. I kind of see it like, you know, when you see someone get on the dance floor and they want to create a circle around them so that they can break dance or do some silly dance move in the middle. They start moving people around, don't they? They start pushing people and getting people to create a circle so that they can stand in the middle and they have space to do all of these crazy dance moves. I think it's like that with your personality. What we've been doing is the equivalent of moving everybody out so that we have room to maneuver in different ways. I want you to start thinking of your own life like this. You have to create space for your personality to expand and take different shapes and forms. Let's say you always leave work and talk about work. Well, what if I said to you tonight you had to go out and talk about anything but work. You're not allowed to get into the subject of your working life. You have to talk about other things. You have to talk about movies or music or just what's going on around you. Many people, if they were honest, would feel very uncomfortable with that. That's precisely the reason to begin expanding your personality and setting yourself the type of challenges like that of saying, I'm gonna go out tonight and I'm not allowed to talk about work. I can only talk about other subjects. That's what it is to start mastering different parts of what I call your impact, different parts of your personal charisma and confidence. And people who do this are, they may not get the immediate reactions they want today. In other words, you can do a video and just like I did, you'll or have a social interaction where you stretch your personality and you'll get reactions like I got. Some of them will call you out on it. some of them won't like it, they'll give you resistance, that's fine. But you'll also find that over time you'll begin to get more respect. Because what people will begin to realize about you is that you don't live for their expectations. You do it for you to try out new parts of your personality, to be who you want to be. And those people, I believe, are rewarded ultimately, even if they have losses in the beginning, they're rewarded ultimately. Someone that I think is interesting for this, for just stepping out and trying new things, and some of you are going to hate me for this. But Kanye West, you can pick your favorite person who applies to my example. But bear with me. Whether you like Kanye West or not, there's something very interesting about the way that he's made his music over the last few years. I was a big Kanye West fan in his first few albums. When he started coming out with some of the new stuff, what was the new one, Jameson? The, and I don't mean the new one. I mean the one that was like three albums ago, 808s and heartbreak, I think it was called. And it was this very kind of synthesized auto-tuned album that was completely different from anything else that he'd done. And I remember listening to it at first and hating it. When I was reading the comment board, comment after comment was saying, this is terrible. I can't stand this. Why doesn't he just go back to classic Kanye? And that's a really hurtful comment, by the way, especially when you've innovated and put yourself on the line to hear people say, go back to the classic you, the one we like. But he innovated with that album. And the funny thing was, I listened to it a few times and I grew addicted to it. I started to fall in love with that album. As did many other people. It became something that a lot of people really began to love. And then he came out with his next album. I'm gonna get this completely wrong. What was it? My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is that right? And it was a completely different sound again. Then he came out with Watch the Throne. Completely different sound again. When I listened to Yeezus, the latest album, I hated that shit. Like, I couldn't stand that. I listened to it and I so wanted to like it because I'm such a big fan of his music. I was listening to it and I was going, I don't know if I can get myself to like this one. Like, it's... I really don't like it. And then I listened to it again and again. It made me lose faith in my own judgment because I really didn't like it and then I grew to absolutely love it. And it doesn't mean I love every track on it, but there's certain tracks on that that I really love. Whether or not you think Kanye is completely batshit crazy, I can't help but appreciate the fact that he's not so scared of what we all think that he stops innovating. I admire so much that type of bravery because the hardest thing to do is to take something that's working for you and change it. If you're the funny guy or the funny girl to take that and change it and suddenly decide, you know what? I'm not gonna be everyone's clown. I'm gonna stop making everyone laugh every 10 seconds and actually start talking about some more interesting and in depth and, and just chilled out things instead of being an entertainer the whole time. That's brave. Because you're used to getting laughs, you're used to getting love for being funny. It's brave to change it. And I'm not saying change who you are. I'm saying that there are other parts of who you are that have gone unnoticed, that have gone untrained, that have not had their muscles built, and that unless we start getting brave enough to, to expand not just our own vision of ourselves, but other people's vision of us, will never break free of the identity we've always had and give ourselves room to become what we can become. My videos in some way have been a kind of microcosm for that in my life. I have made it a social experiment to expand your view of me. over the last year and to see if I can challenge what you know about me and keep pushing those limits. And I will continue to push those limits over the next 12 months. I want to show you that I'm not above that, that I'm there with you trying to make sure that you don't just have a one-dimensional view of me, but you see me for what I can really be. And I want to challenge you now. to go and take risks in your own life and take the risk that your audience, whether it be your friends at a dinner table, whether it be your parents at home, whether it be your siblings, whether it be the colleagues and your bosses at work, take a risk to challenge yourself, your own personality and what they know about you by expanding yourself, by testing the limits of your own charisma, your own confidence and People will resist you. People will tell you that you're not being yourself. People will tell you that you should go back to classic you. And you will know somewhere inside that when people say that, you must be doing something right, because at least it shows you're doing something differently than you were before. And if you find that you do it wrong, if you find that there's something that you don't like about yourself in trying out a new part of your personality, Bring it back. But don't be afraid to innovate because you're gonna go too far. The best innovators in the world do go too far, but somewhere in that middle ground, they find a better, more interesting way of being or operating than they would have if they just stayed in classic then. So there you have it. A little longer than our normal video, but I think this is so important. and I truly hope that this week you'll go and test your own limits as a result of this and risk the same kind of criticism that I risk every week by doing this with you. We're in it together. You're in good company. I'll see you soon. As Kanye West said on September 24th, 2013 on BBC One's Zane Lowe, if you're a fan of Kanye West, you're not a fan of me. You're a fan of yourself. You will believe in yourself. I'm just the espresso. The Kanye thing, you have to just show that process. I don't want people to think that line just like we just said that. Can you fit in the line, you are more than classic Kanye? Never stop changing. because after all, you're more than classic Kanye. And in the words of Beyonce, never stop changing. Wait, so stupid. And in the words of Jay-Z never stop changing because after all, you're more than classic Kanye. Wait, can't we find like a classic crazy Kanye? As Kanye West said on September 24th, 2013 on BBC One's Zane Lowe. As Kanye West said on September 24th, 2013 on BBC One's Zane Lowe, if you're a fan of Kanye West, you're not a fan of me. You're a fan of yourself. You will believe in yourself. It's time to sound like a preacher. All right. Channel the Kanye. You're not a fan of me. You're a fan of yourself. You will believe in you. Wait, I want to give you this, even if you don't use it.
