Kanye West is a pop artist. An argument could be made that he is a top 10 pop artist of all time. No argument could be made that he is a top 10 musician of all time. If you did, then you would be gutting what it means to be a great musician. Most would expect a great musician to be a virtuoso and possess skills that require great talent and dedication to their instrument. Artur Rubinstein, Maria Callas, Jascha Heifitz, Ravi Shankar, Django Reinhart, Dizzy Gillespie, Vladimir Horowitz, and so on, are all considered great master musicians and virtuosos. It is just silly to put Kanye West in the same sentence with any of these musicians.
If by musician, you are really talking about composing, then the answer is the same. Mahler, Beethoven, Monk, Shostakovich, Miles Davis, and so on are all composers that have made works of art that Kanye West cannot compete with based on any rational metric. But, again, Kanye West could arguably be a top 10 all time composer of pop music, for what that is worth.
I went to music school. People teaching theory are composers who had tons of talent, but could never get off the ground with a big commission. They are very intelligent and talented people and like to stir up the pot in their class in what is otherwise a fairly boring academic subject.