Kanye West interviewed Rihanna for the cover story of the forthcoming issue of Interview, and despite the fact that the two of them know each other and have collaborated on songs, he totally manages to weird her out. For good reason. Check it out.
Kanye: So what inspired you to have that pink tank on your last tour? That was amazing, when you were sitting on top of the army tank.
Rihanna: I love to combine femininity with a kind of extreme masculine egde, and I felt like the tank is just not a typical thing that you think of when you think of a girl — or in any kind of relation to a girl. Then we made it hot pink. We just added that touch.
Kanye: I mean, people really need to see a photograph — the entire tank was pink. That was a great piece of commercial pop art. Was the idea of that to kind of portray an American Dream — like the fantasy of a this hot black girl sitting on a top of a pink tank?
Rihanna: I never actually thought of it like that.
Kanye: How does it feel to know that you could have any man in the world. Or woman. How does it feel to know that you can turn straight women gay?
Rihanna: Is that a real question?
Kanye: Yeah.
Rihanna: Well … Thank you. I don’t know how to feel about that. I guess that’s flattering.
Kanye: But just to have that level of power. How do deal with it? No one woman should have that much power.
And there’s more!
Like, when Kanye asks Rihanna if she knows any famous people.
Kanye: How did you get signed?
Rihanna: Well, I met Evan [Rogers] and Carl [Sturken], these two producers who live here in New York. They are both married to Barbadian women, so they go there to vacation all the time. My friend introduced me to them, and I sang for them, and we talked, and they had me and my mom come back a couple of days later. After that, we started traveling to New York, working on a demo. Within a year, it was done, and we sent it out. Def Jam was the first label to call back. We got other calls, but they were the most enthusiastic. It was so nerve-wracking, though, the whole experience.
Kanye: Why?
Rihanna: I mean, I was 16. From Barbados. Like, you would never … the chances of ever meeting somebody famous or ever being signed — that was just a deadly combination. Like, I had to meet Jay-Z and audition for him at the same time.
Kanye: Do you know any famous people now?
Rihanna: Huh?