‘Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy’ Directors On How Kanye West Conquered Rap – Contenders TV: Docs + Unscripted
23.04.2022 - 21:29
/ deadline.com
Kanye West has become possibly the world’s most famous and revered rap star, dominating headlines with his music and his personal life. But there was a time – hard as it is to imagine – when he was pegged as “just” a great record producer, and not a performer in his own right.
The Netflix docuseries Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy dials back to that time when Ye (as he calls himself now) struggled to be taken seriously as a solo artist. The series is directed by Coodie Simmons and Chike Ozah, who made some of West’s most important music videos. Simmons grew up in Chicago, as did Kanye, and began shooting video of West back in the late 1990s, well before the rapper released his first solo album.
“To actually start documenting him, what inspired me was Hoop Dreams, the documentary that Steve James did the about Arthur Agee and William Gates,” Simmons said as he and Ozah appeared at Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted event. “I kept running into Kanye [in Chicago]. And then… Hoop Dreams, I seen that. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I should do a Hoop Dreams on Kanye’ and that was the start. And then God led me to New York to start really documenting him day to day.”
There are scenes in the trilogy that make clear Roc-A-Fella Records, where West was a hitmaking producer, didn’t originally support his solo career dreams. But he held tight to a vision of his ultimate success.
“Kanye is very, very strategic and very smart. I think he had a plan for the way he saw himself making it. Before we all know what that plan is, it’s probably in his head,” Ozah said. “You have to kind of read into almost everything he does sometimes because you’re not sure if it’s part of a bigger plan. Maybe 10 years from now something else
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