Kanye West has blamed a copy of Playboy magazine he saw when he was just five years old for developing a “full-blown addiction” to pornography.
The 42-year-old rapper opened up about a variety of topics in a wide-ranging interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1 on Thursday, including his recent decision to “kick” his porn habit.
“Playboy was my gateway into full-blown pornography addiction,” he said. “My dad had a Playboy left out at age five, and it’s affected almost every choice I made for the rest of my life. From age five, to now having to kick the habit. And it just presents itself in the open, like it’s OK. And I stand up and say, you know, it’s not OK.”
The father-of-four added that God helped him beat the addiction, explaining: “With God, I’ve been able to beat things that had a full control of me.”
Kanye also struggled with an addiction to sex following the death of his mother Donda in 2007.
“My mom had passed a year before, and I had said, ‘Some people drown themselves in drugs. And I drown myself in my addiction.’ Sex. And that’s what fed the ego, too. Money, clothes, cars, accolades, social media, paparazzi photos, going to Paris fashion week, all of that,” he added.
Now he’s got his life back on track, thanks to his religious conversion, Kanye thinks of himself as “no longer an entertainer” but a “Christian innovator.”
“Now that I’m in service to Christ, my job is to spread the gospel, to let people know what Jesus has done for me,” he explained. “I’ve spread a lot of things. There was a time I was letting you know what high fashion had done for me, I was letting you know what the Hennessey (Cognac) had done for me, but now I’m letting you know what Jesus has done for me, and in that I’m no longer a slave, I’m a son now, a son of God. I’m free.”
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