Once upon a time, in a fictional galaxy now owned by Disney, a blond farm boy named Luke Skywalker lived on the Lars homestead. Due to a susceptibility to military propaganda and religious extremism, he would eventually leave his rural moisture farm, which resembled a brutalist igloo dropped in the middle of the Tunisian Republic desert. 42 years later, one of the world’s most successful pop musicians and polymaths envisions a world where homelessness is combatted by some of the same architecture featured in George Lucas’s 1977’s hit Star Wars: A New Hope.
During Kanye West‘s Forbes cover story, he takes writer Zack O’Malley Greenburg on a tour of “oblong and dozens of feet tall” prototypes. “Inspired by Luke Skywalker’s childhood home, West has been working with a team to design prefabricated structures that sport the same austere aesthetic, with the goal of deploying them as low-income housing units,” Greenburg writes.
Taking West’s long history with Star Wars into account, the idea isn’t fully a surprise. References to the movie franchise frequently appear in his lyrics, and last year he appeared with Adam Driver (Kylo Ren) on an episode of SNL. The multi-billion-dollar property is also semi-responsible for his marriage to Kim Kardashian.
In 2004, when his comedy dreams were still aflame, Kanye created a pilot called Alligator Boots for Comedy Central. Kanye demanded that Kardashian be part of the pilot and she ended up playing Princess Leia in a skit.
“I told Kanye that it was a bad idea, but I did it as diplomatically as I could,” Daniel Kellison, the co-creator of Crank Yankers told Wired. “I said, The Muppet Show always had one star. You’re the star of the pilot. We can put Kim Kardashian in episode 3 or 4, but let’s focus on you.’ But he resisted. Kanye is tenacious and he kept asking me about it, and finally we compromised and agreed to have her in a sketch. He’d never met her at this point.
In 2015, Kim Kardashian wrote, “Star Wars kinda brought me to Kanye.” Now, Star Wars will hopefully bring housing to the less fortunate.
