Kanye West's 10 Most "Kanye" On-Camera Moments

The Good, The Bad, and The Yeezy.

Kanye West Mike Myers
NBC

If there's anything that Kanye has proven over the past decade, it's that he knows how to stay at the forefront of the pop culture consciousness - regardless of what he's doing.

Ever since he burst on the scene with "Through the Wire" and "Jesus Walks" in 2003-04, he's stayed ahead of the musical curve. When he wasn't topping charts with "Gold Digger" or "Stronger," he was defining the sound of 2010s mainstream curve on 808s and Heartbreak or creating one of the most critically acclaimed albums of all time, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Even Yeezus, with its harsh, industrial production and acerbic lyrics, will probably achieve widespread acceptance a few years down the road.

But with all of Kanye's trendsetting influence in music, and now fashion, has come Kanye's arrogant persona, the man who isn't afraid to speak his mind ever. Sometimes that's come back to bite him in a big way--no matter how you spin it, no matter how much "All the Single Ladies" deserved an award, getting drunk at the 2009 VMAs and interrupting Taylor Swift was a poor decision that has haunted Yeezy for years.

But if you look beyond the most obvious, blaring examples of Kanye's on-camera bluster and parse through the often inarticulate rambling, you can find Kanye West bringing up very important, very real issues.

Kanye is the world's greatest living contradiction, and we're being unfair to him if we don't explore every corner of his personality. Approach this list with an open mind.

10. Kanye Raps "Self-Conscious" ("All Falls Down") On Def Jam Poetry (2004)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M17XewSVeUo

For anyone who says that Kanye has nothing important to say, I point to The College Dropout and drop the mic.

"All Falls Down" might be the best song off his debut record, or at least the song that would prove most definitive of the rest of his career. In this spoken word version performed for Def Jam Poetry (in which he is introduced as "the future of hip hop"), he's switched the first and second verses of the song, causing it to start out with his own hyper-self-conscious experience, move to a discussion of the "single black female addicted to retail," and finally close with a caustic remark on African Americans being oppressed as consumers and "a white man get paid off of all of that."

A few things of note pop up in this video. First, Kanye seems a little jittery onstage at first, but his ambition is clear: "I'm trying to be the best-dressed rapper in the game." Already, his goal is to summit the twin peaks of hip-hop and fashion, but because he's not there yet, people can look at him as the lovable upstart. His confidence, tempered by the titular self-consciousness and anxiety, is here viewed as a positive. He's at his most relatable in this video, and consequently he hasn't made very many enemies.

Second, and more importantly, we see that even at this early stage in his career, Kanye is politically aware and activist. He never had the street cred of the gangsta rappers who dominated the scene in the early to mid-2000s, but he was still black and therefore still subject to institutional racism in America. And his commentary on that subject is often overlooked in his lyrics, where people tend to focus far more on his self-aggrandizement.

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