Kanye West won his first American Music Award on Sunday night.

“I’d like to thank everybody who accepted me trying to break new boundaries in music,” Kanye said as he accepted the award for Favorite rap/hip-hop album category for his Graduation album.

“It’s our responsibility as musicians to keep pushing each other, to keep competing with each other. It’s a really great competition,” Kanye told the audience. “I see artists like Beyonce and Alicia Keys and Rihanna and Chris Brown and Chris Martin all in the same room and we’re going to push this music to the point where it was like in the 1960s and ’70s where you talk about Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. We will be the new Beatles. We will be the new Hendrix. They say in any other industry, you know, you’re supposed to do better than the past … but when you say, ‘I want to be Elvis,’ they say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Well, I wanna be Elvis.”