A Genius In Praise of Himself

[Grabs his laptop and opens to an image of the cover of Portishead's 1998 album "Roseland NYC Live," featuring a sea of string players.] Seeing this album cover did so much for me. This picture inspired me. I saw it years back, but on my first album I couldn't afford real strings. So after I won those Grammys, the first thing I did was run to Jon Brion, and then I ran and got a string section. Hip-hop never had strings that lush with drums that hard. But Portishead had that. And they sounded hip-hop, and people vibed to that. I said, "OK, what if we do that and I drop my poetry shit on top of it?" [Quoting "Anchorman"] "Drink it in San Diego, it goes down smooth."

- Kanye West, 2007