Kanye plots to remove fans, pants

Kanye West has, rather quickly, been turning into the hip hop Elton John - still capable of the odd flash of brilliance, but mostly just grumpy and irrelevant. It turns out, though, that it's not because he's lost it. Kanye has a plan:

"I made a decision. I wanna make popular music, but I want less fans," he told writer Sean Fennessey when asked if was comfortable with fame. "I want the freedom of having less fans. It's like the freedom of having less money. If you have less money, you have less responsibility."

Wow, how lucky his fans are melting away. At this rate, by the middle of 2011, Kanye will have no responsibility at all.

Yes, you might well ask if Kanye has actually thought this through, and if the evidence of all human experience is that the more money you have, the less responsible you have to be. And, indeed, if Kanye wants to not have so much money, if he'd not be better off giving away the money he already has rather than behaving like a petulant twit at awards shows in the hope of making money less quickly in the future.

It seems, though, that once Kanye is poor enough to no longer be responsible, he's going to take his clothes off:

It's like Björk. If she wanted to pose naked, you'd be like, 'Oh, that's Björk.' But if I wanted to pose naked, people would draw all type of things into it. I definitely feel like, in the next however many years, if I work out for two months, that I'll pose naked. I break every rule and mentality of hip-hop, of black culture, of American culture."

Oh, yes - keeping fit and appearing naked in a magazine. That's never happened before in American culture.

Kanye then adds that he's aiming for 20,000 fans, although given that he thinks he's one of the greatest living lyricists of his age, losing so many followers will be a real challenge for him.