Kanye Is Back & Apparently Kim Kardashian Is Marie Antoinette

Kanye West recently interviewed his friend and interior designer Axel Vervoordt for The Hollywood Reporter, which gave insight into what’s on Kanye’s mind these days...kind of.

The interview was rife with Kanye-isms. To start, the hip-hop mogul spoke of his imminent philosophy book called Break The Simulation. At one point, after discussing the importance of staying focused on the present and not looking to the past for inspiration, West referred to Kim Kardashian West as “a Marie Antoinette of our time.” One wonders what the heck West meant by that. Some aspects of the comment ring true: Like Antoinette, Kardashian West grew up wealthy and in the public eye, far removed from the lower-class masses, but it's doubtful that was the implication West was making.

Marie Antoinette is a controversial historical figure, most famously associated with a comment she may or may not have uttered: “Let them eat cake!” Her position as the Dauphine of France during the French Revolution (and the fact that she powdered her hair with starch while Parisians were starving to death) eventually led to her assassination. But more recently, the idea of Marie Antoinette got a candy-coloured makeover by director Sofia Coppola, colouring the monarch as a whimsical teenager unaware of real-world horrors. Perhaps this is West's perception of Marie Antoinette: a fashionable, gorgeous woman of royalty, misunderstood by society. It is a fairly shallow reading of the real-life Antoinette, but one that would make more sense if West is comparing his wife to her. Maybe the comparison is closer to the truth than we realise. If Marie Antoinette were alive today, she might have published a book of selfies before Kim K. even thought of it.

West also compared himself to the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in the interview, rattled off a slightly contrarian take on Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and spoke of meeting people who feel like they’re "from the future."

West is easily hip-hop’s most cryptic and eccentric character. He once claimed that George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people.” He ignited a public feud with Taylor Swift. In 2016, he was hospitalised for exhaustion after a string of strange behaviour during performances. Shortly thereafter, the rapper turned up at Trump Tower for a meeting with Donald Trump, just a month after he was elected to be president. West is known for his erratic speeches, and often disappears from the public eye completely. On Valentine’s Day, West returned to Instagram for the first time in over a year to post post 55 photos of past and present couples, capping off the spree with a pic of himself and wife Kim Kardashian with the caption “Kimye.” He then deleted his Instagram account. Again.

He also resurrected his Twitter account, which flatlined in May 2017. He quickly deleted all of his old tweets, and only one welcome back retweet remains on his thread. It looks like Twitter isn’t the place to go if you want the latest scoop on West.