Kanye West has worked with dozens of collaborators over the course of his career, and one of them, La Roux (real name Elly Jackson), didn’t seem to have the most positive experience, as she noted in a recent interview.
In a conversation with BBC Radio 1 DJ Phil Taggart on his Slacker Podcast, Taggart brought up that La Roux once had a collaboration with Kanye (she appears on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and she interjected, “‘Collaboration’ is too much of a strong word. I just turned up and did what I was told, kind of.”
She continued, “He’s one of those people that’s not 100 percent normal. It’s kind of a fascinating world to be in. […] You can’t talk about anything normal. You can’t just have a normal conversation — I didn’t manage to, anyway, I found it impossible. He’s on show 24 hours a day. It’s just him. It’s also kind of amazing to be around. I’ll never be around anything like that again. It was really strange. He kind of wants it to be strange as well. That’s kind of what I got from it. I was like, ‘You want this to be weird, you want people to walk away saying: ‘That was really weird.” But then I did walk away saying it was quite weird.”
La Roux then said after privately speaking to a mutual friend about the experience, he told Kanye about their conversation, and Kanye apparently demanded an apology: “One of his friends that I knew, afterwards, […] he kind of looked at me like, ‘It was weird, wasn’t it?’ […] I was like: ‘Yeah, that was pretty weird.’ […] I said I found it all a bit strange. And then he told [Kanye], and they made me write an apology email to him. It was quite creepy. […] I remember writing it, sat on my sofa, lol-ing to myself: ‘Dear Kanye…’ […] It was ridiculous, I just wrote it all with a massive grin on my face. They do genuinely have quite a lot of power! I was like, ‘I think I am going to actually apologize! It’s no skin off my nose.’”
She said she was put off by the way Kanye apparently treated some people, continuing, “I didn’t say anything bad about him. I just saw some behavior that wasn’t directed towards me […] that I can’t approve as a fellow human being. I’m not going to go into it, but I saw some behavior that I found upsetting, unsettling. And that’s all I said. I said he was absolutely lovely to me, because he was. It’s a hierarchical situation, I don’t know what to say. I don’t like hierarchy, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I do. And I’m not gonna also [partake in this] ‘conspiracy of silence’ where everyone pretends everything is f*cking normal when it’s blatantly not. I’m not that person, I can’t cover sh*t up. Doesn’t work.”
Listen to the full interview here, with the talk about Kanye beginning at about 41:30 into the episode.
