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Hes been a force in fashion since taking a shine to the designs of A Bathing Ape founder Nigo.
This year, he revealed a capsule collection with Chanel and a unisex athleisure line with Adidas.
Williamss art is both unique and instantly recognizable.
His clothing is loud and colorful.
His beats traffic in offbeat textures and elaborate melodies.
His hooks offset jarring tones with smooth, pleasing notes.
Talking to the man about art was quite like trying to catch up with a comet.
You made songs that soundtracked this decade: Get Lucky, Happy, Blurred Lines.
Where Im anticipating parts.
Different emotional colors that feel good to me.
But I never know …
The film is its own entity.
How do you do one song thats going to represent that?
Privileges that we seamlessly enjoy today, he was one of the main architects behind a lot of it.
I just couldnt believe that.
I was like, Okay, this guy is so much more worldly than I had thought.
So whatever we did, it needed to feel big and open.
The openness is where it started.
And there needed to be something very climactic about the chorus.
He could get the people to congregate behind something he thought was important.
I noticed there were two kinds of people.
He had gotten them to unify in an accord, into a single note.
And then there were other people that distrusted him.
They might not have understood the futuristic viability of his way of looking at things.
But he got them to unify into a single note.
I needed to have choirs.
There was no sound, but thats what I was hearing.
Representative of the people coming together was the choir.
This was the era when Sammy was supporting Richard Nixon.
He was in the middle of a backlash.
I just couldnt help but think of Kanye.
He is no doubt a genius.
And youre not always going to agree with genius.
And genius is not always going to agree with genius in the way that you would assume.
And thats what makes individuality so important in this world.
The respect of individuality.
We dont always have to agree, but we have to live and let live.
And thats what this is, you know?
Its his personal expression.
We have to respect each others right to an opinion.
But they trusted Clarences vision.
They trusted his vision, and they witnessed it.
That is the magic of Clarences career.
Not everybody agrees with what it is that he was trying to do when he put people together.
But they went with it because they trusted him.
I feel like I should ask about time management.
Is your day very tightly regimented?
And if Im interested in it and Im curious about it, then Im there for it.
And I suppose I just dont have time for anything else.
I love my family, and I love my work.
Im interested in God.
Im curious about God.
You know, Im interested in my family.
Im curious about my family.
Im interested in my work, and Im curious about my work.
And those things keep me so close to it because theyre ever-expanding experiences.
Like, the universe itself, it expands in every direction.
Im like that about God, Im like that about work, and Im like that about my family.
The Little Big Town albumwas a daring collaboration at the time.
Country was embracing hip-hop sounds, but not so much the players.
But everyone moved on from the record really quickly, I thought.
Is it a challenge getting someone with a solid track record of hits to think differently about themselves?
For example, take selfies.
Theyre 99.99 percent shot from the same angle.
That tells you so much about the delusion that we have.
We cant really explain it.
Some people who have thought about it a little bit will say, Its not my good side.
Whats a good side to your face?
My job is not so much to get you to trust me.
With your voice, its the same way.
You sing pretty much in one state because thats where everyone told you to.
Its what you convinced yourself is your brightest and most beautiful place to sing.
Use that same part of your voice but a different key.
Or its part of the writing.
Hey, you know you also could write from this point of view.
I justworked with Beck.
And Beck is like … stream of consciousness.
Your pen is so amazing.
And he was like, Huh, okay.
And now his most recent release is a singer-songwriter album.
He didnt see himself that way, but thats what I heard.
That was Shake Ya Ass.
Or, you know, the clean one, Shake It Fast.
Doesnt mean they have to do it for the rest of their career.
But just try something different.
You worked withMac Millerat a pivotal point in his career on hisPink Slimeproject.
I met him a few years after that and watched him in studio sessions.
He told me that he was profoundly affected by watching the way you worked a session.
And he wanted to know more about it.
He wanted people to know that there was way more to him than his indie-rap success.
He wanted people to know the layers and the depth of his potential.
But I would always tell him, Who cares that they know?
And that was the question he could never answer.
It was the question I dont think he was gonna be able to answer.
He was so focused on that quest that he really didnt have time to answer.
Okay, cool, great.
The albums did well.
Youve been a hit maker in three different decades.
Next year, itll be four.
Its not a plan.
Ive not planned to do this.
Its just that Ive been so intensely distracted by new worlds, new music, and new experiences.
I feel more like a Method actor.
I just go into the zone, and Im able to express those things more than I am myself.
Cause I dont know what myself is.
For other artists, when Im working with them, Im more like a mirror.
Im just holding up a mirror for them to see other sides of themselves.
But I dont know what my own sound would be.
Its like a mirror looking into a mirror.
Lets go back in time.
Were you in the studio when N.O.R.E.
Its profound to me.
That song is, like, the Bill Withers unwritten verse that becomes the verse of rap songs.
Like, its a non-thing that just became perfect.What was the Bill Withers song?
Aint No Sunshine.How did he do that?
That verse was a placeholder that stayed on the record because people loved it.Wow.
when he got out on parole in 2003.
They caught some sessions forhis song on the NeptunesClonesalbum.Yeah.
We deserved more years of O.D.B.
His presence is one I see mirrored in a lot of younger artists.
His music was just something else.
Listening to his verses, you realize youre getting a glimpse of how his mind works.
His verses were basically remnants and tidbits of these organized thoughts of his in the form of verses.
Brooklyn Zoo is a perfect, unrepeatable performance.Its just as angry as a punk record.
There are rap records that can do that.
Public Enemy records can do that.
Some Wu Tang records can do that.
Shook One did that.
Dirty just had that kind of thing.
He even had an amazing name.
Getting people thinking outside the box of genre.
What made you want to open those boundaries?Well, that was always my thing, you know?
Mixing things that hadnt previously been mixed together before.
Music is the same way.
If you notice, that happens in all art forms of our sub-modality.
For example, youre talking about mixing genres together, right?
Well, its the same thing with food.
Believe it or not, there was a time when no one had ever tasted peanut butter and jelly.
Or chocolate and peanut butter, like a Reeses cup.
People who ate peanut butter would be like, Get the fuck …
But those two together, Whoa!
What is the difference in fragrance?
Or streetwear and high fashion.Same!
The Reeses cup is timeless.
The idea that rock and rap could come together is timeless.
You look at all the rap records right now.
Its a lot of pop-punk melodies in there.
Run-D.M.C., 30-something years ago.
Like you said, streetwear and high fashion.
Lets talk about your producer signature, as people have called it.
A lot of your beats start on a four count.
I think the first time I heard you do it was the song Frontin.
But I never meant to.
I didnt even realize until someone pointed it out.
I was like, Oh yeah!
Maybe that makes it more magical.
You gotta understand.
At the time, I thought I was.
And my perception of being a solo artist was not really what a solo artist is.
A solo artist is just, like, a single artist, a person, a single entity.
And for me, there was so much built into that.
I looked up to Jay, and I looked up to Puff.
But I thought that was the guy I needed to impress lyrically.
I dont know that I did.
I have no idea.
But that wasnt really for me.
Thats not what being an artist is really about.
It really had nothing to do with me.
It was like, Look, I can do it, too.
Youliterally made it a song.Now, that was probably the closest to who I was on that record.
I wantedsome kid named Tylerto hear that and know that he could do it.
So in that sense, I felt like I achieved.
I got something done.
But it really wasnt me.
Its always been what I needed to prove and explaining myself within the linguistic confines of materialism.
But now I know who I am.
I know that Im a channeler.
I know that I dont really have an image.
I know that, and Im comfortable with that.
And I know that my image is meant to be more like a chameleon.
Do you feel like you had to make that record to learn this?Yeah!
I came out of it, and I was down, because what did I just do?
Who was that for?
Thats what I do.
But looking back, I realize I was channeling.
Thats who I am.
I was never really meant to make a super personal record.
I was always meant to channel.
Thats what Im good at.
A lot of songs that I ended up doing for myself are songs that I wrote for other people.
They were better songs when I was thinking of those people and not myself.
When I think of myself, I cant really be creative.
Whereas theres less gravity on other peoples planets, so Im able to grow.
Thats good to hear.
So, there are two full weeks left in the decade.
Youre now designing condos.
Your Takashi Murakami collaboration is auctioning at Christies.
Are you done surprising us for the decade?I dont even know if theres an answer to that.
All I know is that Im just so grateful to be inspired and so grateful that I have fans.
Will they ever be done inspiring me?
This interview has been edited and condensed.
