The first act of jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy is called “Vision” and takes us back to 1998 when Kanye West was a young, up-and-coming Chicago producer living “beat to beat,” absorbed in the pursuit of rap stardom, his feverish dream.
Fittingly, the three-part documentary — the first installment of which is out on Netflix Feb. 16 — arrives during what Ye has dubbed “Black Future Month,” a reclamation of the tragedy and discouragement that colors so much of Black history and alchemizes it into a forward-facing treatise on Black progress and innovation.
Friday night in Hollywood, in the Citizen News event space, the screening was introduced by co-directors Clarence ‘Coodie’ Simmons (who has been filming Ye since the late 1990s and narrates the documentary) and Chike Ozah, along with J. Ivy, a performance poet and lead scriptwriter on the project.
“This journey started in Chicago back in the ’90s when there was a Chicago Renaissance,” J. Ivy said to the audience. “This is a historic moment — driven by heart, driven by passion, to document this history that was happening in Chicago … that vision that turned into something so incredible, into something so beautiful, it turned into history.”
“This is God sent. It started 21 years ago in Chicago when we were all young and hungry … it took a village,” Simmons said, adding: “Everyone in here is a genius. And when you got geniuses around you, you let them do their genius. And that’s how you get a beautiful project.”
Ozah also thanked Time and Netflix for supporting the project and “the village behind the scenes that helped put this together.”
Act one shows intimate and rare footage of the recording artist’s early career, from studios in Chicago to playing his beats around the pool table in his Newark, New Jersey apartment, and through his dogged path to getting signed as an artist by Roc-A-Fella Records. At one point, Ye shows up at the Roc-A-Fella offices seemingly unannounced and plays his CD for everyone, including the company’s executive assistant at the time. This fearless conviction paid off: he eventually signed a deal with Jay Z and Dame Dash’s company in August 2002.
Another particularly poignant moment shows West’s late mother, Donda West, admiring one of his new gold chains depicting an angel, which the artist could afford as his talent became increasingly in demand. “You know what? You need an angel to watch over you,” she says, which in hindsight, lands like a premonition.
Ye’s presence at the event was a welcome surprise, and following the screening, the subject shared a few thoughts on his life, Hollywood’s “cancel culture,” and the importance of Black unity.
“When y’all see me doing certain things you wouldn’t expect us to do, and y’all would want me to step back… that’s not my position. My position is to make what y’all might think are mistakes in public so I can show you that there ain’t no red line, that ain’t no real wall. That’s just a smokescreen,” Ye said. “And it’s for us to take this. We’re on labels we don’t own, play for basketball teams we don’t own, the time is now.”
Faith in the unseen is a golden thread that runs through the documentary — and Ye’s life, too — leading him through the labyrinth of his creations and his celebrity. On Friday night after the screening concluded, the room quieted into prayer, as Ye and his close associates bowed their heads in tandem with the audience, grateful for the decades-long journey that had ultimately led to the present moment.
“It was so good to see the times I mentioned God throughout the whole journey,” Ye, whose Sunday Services have marked a progressively public demonstration of his Christian faith, shared. “To lean on God when the moments seem the darkest, and to be able to see people trying to play you your whole life every step of the way – there’s always going to be somebody not believing in what you’re doing [but] as you reach new frontiers and new goals in life, and when you have people that believe in you…a community that sticks together, that’s the way that we can protect each other.”
Though a polarizing cultural figure, especially following his 2020 presidential run and vocal support for Donald Trump, Ye’s genius has always been in his ability to create magic in the grey area — as a Midwestern rapper sandwiched between two coasts; as a Black man who’s middle-class upbringing ran in opposition to prevailing “street” stereotypes; as a producer who found lyrics in the time it took to be taken seriously as a rapper; and the space in between two extremes of greatness, to be highly visible and yet perpetually enigmatic.
Ye, the genius, the Afrofuturist, the unlikely producer-turned-rapper who is as much respected as he is criticized, influenced the immersive experience hosted by Netflix. Each room illuminated the relationship between the past and the future, much like the documentary chronicles Ye’s life pre- and post-fame. Lo-fi video graphics and analog objects like 1990s desktop computers, fax and copying machines, retro-producing equipment, and office chairs were surrounded by installations of overgrown flora and fauna; the tension between created media images and the organic nature of real-life was a consistent theme throughout the night.
The afterparty, downstairs at Chef Evan Funke’s Mother Wolf, was a constellation of stars: Ye, Da Baby, Roddy Ricch, Quavo, Taraji P. Henson, Usher, Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, and others.
“I got offered $100 million by Larry Jackson to put Donda [his latest album] on Apple, but I ain’t never got a meeting with Tim Cook,” Ye said, adding: “It ain’t about the money, it’s about our power and our respect, collectively.”
The story starts exploring Ye’s tunnel vision on rap stardom and leaves with a cliffhanger that suggests acts two and three will show his career expand and his vision bloom into a broader view. “Those tapes…that I would’ve been embarrassed for y’all to see…all make sense now,” Ye said.
In his closing remarks, Ye emphasized his interest in staying true to himself and moving forward. “I be saying stuff that people try to remind me in Black History Month that people got killed for. But this is Black Future Month, and we alive.”
Source: Hollywood
