Or maybe the best celebrity. West has always operated without a filter, and has long been one of pop culture’s great disrupters. He announced, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” into the camera on a live Hurricane Katrina telethon and rushed the stage to interrupt Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, saying, “I’ma let you finish but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” In 2012, when the designer Hedi Slimane reportedly said West could only attend his first runway show for Saint Laurent and no others at Paris Fashion Week — a fairly standard request — West took offense and said so, openly and repeatedly; the two still don’t speak. “I’m not angry anymore,” West said, “but I had to get my anger out.” A few moments later, he pulls up a potential cover image for a forthcoming single: It’s a photo of the Saint Laurent store in Chicago after it was robbed last year, its front window shattered, the logo fractured.

Generally, though, the current-day West seems tempered — at least somewhat. Maybe this is owing to his newfound domesticity. He takes his role as a husband and father seriously. “I feel like now I have an amazing wife, a supersmart child and the opportunity to create in two major fields,” he said. “Before I had those outlets, my ego was all I had.” But he also speaks “all the time” to a doctor who specializes in anger management therapy, a fortuitous byproduct of an altercation with a paparazzo at Los Angeles International Airport. (He had two such incidents; the second time he was court-ordered to anger management.)

He claims he’s trying harder to let things go. When Beck beat out Beyoncé for Best Album at the Grammys in February, West walked on stage in a near-farcical echo of what he’d done to Taylor Swift, but then thought better of it and returned to his seat. (He later apologized to Beck on Twitter.) And adversaries are being greeted with warmth, which may actually be shrewdness. On Twitter, he invited Fern Mallis to meet: “If you wanna have a drink with me, book a table at the spotted pig when I’m back in NY.” More recently, after publicly chiding Bernard Arnault, LVMH Chairman and C.E.O., for refusing to take a meeting with him, West arranged a series of impromptu concerts through Arnault’s 22-year-old son, Alexandre, and performed them at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The elder Arnault attended the first concert, later congratulating West backstage. (He got his meeting.)

West’s newly mellowed self is also beginning to come through in his music. Following the raw scrape of industrial noise-rap that was the “Yeezus” album, there was “Only One,” a tender number sung from the perspective of his late mother, Donda (who died unexpectedly in 2007) and recorded with Paul McCartney. Then came “FourFiveSeconds,” a stripped-down folk song with Rihanna and McCartney.

“I have this table in my new house,” West said, offering a parable. “They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table, and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked.

“I realized that table was my ego. No matter what you put around it, under it, no matter who photographed it, the douchebaggery would always come through.”