The next thing I knew I was in a closet with this cool bearded white brother getting ready to record. I’d seen this guy working out of this tiny room in the back. He’d been there since I got there. I figured he must be a stand-in for Mike Dean—Kanye’s main engineer who hadn’t gotten to Hawaii yet—but it turned out he was the voice behind the distorted vocals on the song’s intro. We ended up smoking a whole bunch of joints and kicking the shit while I laid down my little verse.
So there you have it: Rick Ross got absurdly stoned with a two-time Grammy Award winner—one of the biggest names in indie music—and thought he was basically a temp. Incredible.There are a few other gems in the excerpt—at one point, Ross explains how he came up with his verse on "Devil in a New Dress"; at another, he talks about connecting Kanye with Pusha T—but maybe the greatest detail is Ross's description of the signs Kanye had taped up all over the studio, one of the most Kanye things Kanye has ever done.This hippy motherfucker ended up being Justin Vernon of the band Bon Iver. But I didn’t find that out until later. During the time we spent working together I had no clue who he was and I didn’t think to ask.
The first thing I noticed were all these signs Kanye had put up on the walls.
I'm not sure what "racking focus" means or exactly what constitutes a "hipster hat," but no one can argue with the eternal wisdom of "just shut the fuck up sometimes." Put that on my tombstone.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.NO TWEETING
NO HIPSTER HATS
ALL LAPTOPS ON MUTE
JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP SOMETIMES
NO TWEETING PLEASE THANK YOU
NO BLOGGING
NO NEGATIVE BLOG VIEWING
DON’T TELL ANYONE ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING WE’RE DOING!
NO RACKING FOCUS WHILE MUSIC IS BEING PLAYED OR MUSIC IS BEING MADE
TOTAL FOCUS ON THIS PROJECT IN ALL STUDIOS
NO ACOUSTIC GUITAR IN THE STUDIO
NO PICTURES