Two days before the premiere of the documentary jeen-yush: A Kanye Trilogy This Monday at the Sundance festival, the film’s protagonist, rapper Kanye West (today renamed Ye, Georgia, United States, 44 years old), raised his hand on his Instagram account: “I’m going to say this kindly for the last time. I have to have the final cut and approve this documentary before it premieres on Netflix. Please open the editing room immediately so I can be responsible for my own image. Thanks in advance”. And a smiley emoji.
The media alarms awoke, what would the film reveal? Why was he now claiming control over a film that had been in the making for more than 20 years with his permission, directed for a long time by his very close friend, Coodie Simmons? “As far as I know, Kanye has not seen it yet,” revealed the director at Sundance, who abandoned his career as a comedian and on television to follow the then only promise of the hip hop. “His team has seen him and I think they showed him something, but I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it,” Simmons added.
Coodie asked him for confidence and suggested that they see him together, “stop laughing and crying in each other’s arms” discovering images of their first meeting in the late nineties and those first years of falling and getting back up, of constant rejections and closed doors. But so far he has not had a response from Kanye, who, after his virtual request, has gone to Paris fashion week to walk his new relationship with actress Julia Fox.
Inspired by the documentary Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994), who was following the careers of two young men in their attempt to reach the NBA, Coodie felt that Kanye would land far away in music and decided to stick close to him, camera in hand, to “see how far his dreams would go.” ”. Jeen-yush (reads genius, genius in English) is the result, plus 320 hours of recording over 20 years, especially intense since the rapper moved to New York in 2001 and until the release of his debut album The College Dropout (2003). With long breaks: after the car accident, the death of his mother (Donda) and, above all, in the last decade, during his marriage to Kim Kardashian and his rise to the Olympus of fame more as a personal brand than as a singer, at which point Coodie was no longer in his inner circle (he wasn’t even invited to the wedding with Kim).
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The documentary is four and a half hours, divided into three independent films (to be released on Netflix from February 16). The first is the one that will be the most emotional for Kanye fans and also the most revealing for the general public. It focuses on the moment when he begins to make a name for himself as a producer, when his compositions end up in the mouth of Jay-Z turned into Izzo (HOVA), “the song that changed my life”, as West himself admits in the film. He tries to rise as a rapper, but nobody wants to give him the vote of confidence, either because they don’t believe in his talent, or because they don’t want to lose him as a creator of rhythms, as a producer. Kanye prefers to cling to the latter option and so he drags himself, almost literally, to the offices of Roc-A-Fella Records, the label of Dame Dash, Jay-Z and Biggs Burke to put his songs in the offices of media executives. hair. He walks out of there with his head down.
Back in Chicago, to regain his self-confidence, to polish his ego a little, he goes to his mother’s house, Donda, and it is those images that portray a real and even vulnerable Kanye West. She is the only person more important than himself, the only one he cares for and thanks for everything she did for him. And she, his biggest fan, paints him as “arrogant” with a heart and reminds him “that the giant does not see himself in the mirror”, that you have to “keep your feet on the ground”. “I think those sequences with Donda are the ones that are going to excite Kanye the most,” Coodie said at the Festival. “It’s the best time for Kanye to listen to her.”
Coodie and his co-director and partner Chike tried to release the documentary as early as 2016, but they respected the crisis Kanye suffered coinciding with the album and tour The Life of Pablo. “He told us he wasn’t ready,” he says. But now the time had come, including footage from his presidential campaign and at the Wyoming ranch, but little or nothing with Kim Kardashian, and generally leaving out all the controversies that the media had already covered extensively. “This is the archetypal hero’s journey,” said Chike. “It’s a faith-based movie, directed by God,” added Coodie, who in his faith hopes to stay connected with his old friend. “We all have a genius inside of us, you just have to find it and bring it out. That’s what Kanye did.”
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