Kanye West has said he's surprised by the impact of his anti-Bush comments following Hurricane Katrina - you may remember that he appeared on that NBC fundraiser and said "George Bush doesn't care about black people".
West told Rolling Stone: "What surprised me most was the impact of my voice on NBC. It's just magical that I can say something that's a popular opinion and it really has an impact. I knew I wasn't going to read the whole [scripted] levee thing, because we'd practiced that earlier. I didn't think about Bush until the telethon. I saw him [on TV] -- I'm like, 'Wait a second, dude, that guy over there, he doesn't care.' But America was already headed that way. I think it was a common opinion."
West has also recently criticised homophobia in the hip-hop community, and says that provoked a more hostile reaction: "I got more backlash for that than for the Bush comment. It's wrong, and so many of my friends do that. We gay-bash. We feel like it's OK to call a gay person a fag. We fought so hard to make it so white people couldn't say the word 'nigger' to our face. But it's not far-fetched to picture a black person calling a gay person a fag to their face. So that shows you the climate, where we're at right now. And it's not about racism, it's about discrimination."