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...that makes him sound like Eminem, it's worth noting that West is usually incorrigible like a puppy, not a pit bull. "His music is about being human," says West's obviously biased mother Donda, who recently retired from her post as chair of the English department at Chicago State University. "It's like Walt Whitman. 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.'" West's old boss, Damon Dash, puts it a little differently: "He combines the superficialness that the urban demographic needs with conscious rhymes for the kids with backpacks...
...booming gospel sample from the Arc Choir and one of West's typical contradictions, his admission that he's not particularly religious and his anger that songs with Jesus in the title don't get played on the radio. Che Smith, a friend of West's from Chicago who raps as Rhymefest, gave West the sample, wrote some of the first verse and receives half the song's royalties. "But Jesus Walks is all Kanye," says Smith. "When he wrote, 'To the hustlers, killers, murderers, drug dealers/ Even the strippers/ Jesus Walks for them!', I said, 'Wait, it doesn...
Raised in the Chicago neighborhood of South Shore by his mother (his parents divorced when he was 3, and he spent summers with his father Ray, a former Black Panther who is now a Christian marriage counselor), West went to good schools, received art and music lessons and, when he was 10, spent a year in Nanjing, China, where his mother was a visiting professor. Like many suburban kids, he developed a passion for hip-hop that was only enhanced by his awareness that the genre often romanticized bad behavior. His mother did not exactly approve; when West went...
...parents had other ideas. "My plan was that he would get at least one degree, if not several," says his mom, the Ph.D. After Kanye graduated from high school in 1995, he enrolled in art school and took an English class for a year at Chicago State before finally confronting his parents. After months of lengthy conversations, West persuaded them to let him try rapping and producing for a year. Recalls Donda: "He said, 'Mom, I can do this, and I don't need to go to college because I've had a professor in the house with...
During the day, West worked as a telemarketer to pay the $200 a month his mother demanded in rent. At night he honed his delivery and made beats for other rappers. Within a few months he had his first major sale--$8,000 from a Chicago rapper named Gravity. "That's when I knew the one-year plan was out the window," says West. Soon he was making beats for Bad Boy Records' rapper Mase, and in 2001 West produced several tracks for Jay-Z's groundbreaking album The Blueprint, using samples of old songs (the Doors' Five...