Kanye West, the 22-time Grammy-award-winning rapper, just released a new documentary on Netflix chronicling his career titled jeen-yuhs. Rising to fame as a producer in the late 90s and early 2000s, West eventually launched his first album The College Dropout in early 2004. Upon release, it quickly skyrocketed to number two on the US Billboard 200 chart and won Best Rap Album at the 2005 Grammys. Since his start, Ye continues to show how he is unlike any rapper and producer in music history.
jeen-yuhs consists of three parts. The first, titled “Act I,” premiered on Netflix on Feb. 16, 2022. The documentary debuted as part of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year in January. The documentary shows Kanye’s struggle to be taken seriously as a rapper instead of just a producer, his attempts to get signed to Jay-Z’s record label and the story of his loving connection to his late mother, Donda.
Directors Clarence “Coodie” Simmons and Chike Ozah were brought together with the rapper early on in his career, shooting the music video for his legendary single, “Through the Wire.” Although the documentary is four-and-a-half hours long, it still leaves questions unanswered since many parts of Kanye’s life and artistry are left unexamined. This is due to the fact that Kanye stopped providing access to Simmons and Ozah to continue creating the series after dropping his debut album in 2004.
A lot of Kanye’s most well-known scandals are left unmentioned: his public entanglements with pop music artist, Taylor Swift along with his marriage to Kim Kardashian. There is a large gap in the documentary from when West released his albums Graduation, 808s and Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus and there is no behind-the-scenes footage of him recording any of these albums.
In part two of the documentary, the audience can see the tension between Coodie and West begin to rise. Coodie and Kanye met while Coodie was working on the Chicago public access show Channel Zero, but Kanye quickly moved out of media range, rising up in stardom for Coodie to continue to have the same access he once did.
Unfortunately, viewers of the documentary will not be hearing many of the rapper’s famous tracks as this is essentially an “unauthorized” film, meaning that the directors did not have the entirety of Kanye’s discography to choose from when inserting music due to rights and clearance issues.
As previously mentioned, Donda West played a huge role in Kanye’s rise to fame. A scene in the first part of the documentary features his late mother who comes across as kind, loving and encouraging. She always pushed Kanye to follow his dreams from the start of his career as a producer. Donda was Kanye’s biggest fan and constantly gave quality advice to her son as he continued to climb in status. Director Coodie even mentions, “It was easy to see that the confidence he had in himself was because of the confidence Donda had in him.”
2022 has just begun and Kanye has already taken it underway.
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