Kanye West: Before the Legend

Amber Communications Group, Inc.’s imprint Colossus Books has published KANYE WEST: Before the Legend—The Rise of Kanye West and The Chicago Rap and R&B Scene—The Early Years by Jake Brown. The fascinating story of Kanye’ West from the studio years as Jay Z’s producer to his escalation to the top of the music charts as an international phenomenon.

Kanye Omari West is a hip hop musician, songwriter, record producer, film director, and fashion designer.
With over 80 photos that detail Kanye from the beginning of his studio days to the grand explosion of winning three Grammy Awards for Best Rap Solo, Best Rap Song and Best Rap Album in 2006. Author Jake Brown takes you on a vivid six-year journey that encompasses all the ins and outs of becoming the legend that millions of Kanye West fans have come to adore.

Kanye West is getting his due props, in the moment, because he demands it.  West wouldn’t just shoot for the stars, even when he was producing them, as he wanted most of all to be one in his own right.  Few realize how important Kanye West had been to the hip-hop movement between 2000 and 2006, well before he became a solo phenomenon, back when he was still a fledgling producer working on Jay Z’s The Blueprint – arguably the first 5 MIC’s-worthy album of the Millennium – and the record, which most critics and fans alike consider to be the most musically consistent and influential album of his career.  Kanye’s talent to lay samples over beats captured the moment better than any other producer to come along since Dr. Dre. Fellow hip-hop mogul P. Diddy’s view on Kanye’s relevance to the future of the rap game, simply stated “God put him here to do this. I’ve been producing for a minute, and I know that he is definitely the next generation: a real hit maker.”

West was the first hip-hop spokesman for the African American SUBURBAN population, those who had grown up as he did—in the blue-collar Midwest.  He could rap about being a student in a statistically white-dominated University system where he wasn’t a star athlete, rather just another student.  He could rap about coming from a working class family, but with a mother who had a doctorate and championed her son’s career pursuits as blindly as a single, African American mother working at menial labor jobs to support her children’s dreams.  West had plenty of COMMONalities to the well-known story of the young, African American male from the working class neighborhood in Chicago he grew up in, to the fact he was the product of a single-parent home. The difference with West as a reflection of a specific demographic of African Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 laid in the fact that he wasn’t escaping the ghetto, rather the working class.

Kanye West gave that generation an identity it had not previously had.  As the producer explained, “I really felt like those kids were not being spoken for.  By pitching himself in image as a college student, he was targeting a largely untapped image that few if any hip-hop stars had taken on, up to that point in 2003. Moreover, West was in a position, as both producer and rapper, to exclusively create and tailor his own sub-genre of hip-hop.

West is the millennium’s first rapper with enough musical and lyrical sophistication  to imply through his music’s message that everyone from the inner city to the suburban middle-class young black male has the same right to go to college as his or her grandparents did to sit in the front of the bus. The parallel lies in the erasing of labels be they colored-only bathroom signs or those more subtle ones put on display in reality TV shows.

Through his sound, West breaks it all down, and in the course of KANYE WEST: Before the Legend—The Rise of Kanye West and The Chicago Rap and R&B Scene—The Early Years, we as students will uncover the method behind this genius’s multi-platinum madness, from Jay Z’s ‘The Blueprint’, lesson by lesson, through to ‘College Drop Out’ and ‘Late Registration’, and beyond. His beloved “Chicago Times” certainly felt that was the case in late 2003 when they predicted that “West is indeed really putting it down, and the answer to his question of ‘what if ’ is that he seems destined to become hip-hop’s next multi-platinum superstar.”

KANYE WEST: Before the Legend—The Rise of Kanye West and The Chicago Rap and R&B Scene—The Early Years chapters include: “Kanye West on the Come-Up”, “Welcome to the R.O.C.”, “College Dropout”, “Arrogance or Brutal Honesty?”, “Kanye’ West: IN-DEMAND”, “GOOD”, “COMMON & John Legend”, “Late Registration”, “Hip-hop Looks WESTward” and “Kanye West Discography”.

KANYE WEST: Before the Legend—The Rise of Kanye West and The Chicago Rap and R&B Scene—The Early Years was written by Nashville-based music biographer Jake Brown who has published over thirty books including: Prince: In the Studio; Dr. Dre: In the Studio; Suge Knight: The Rise, Fall and Rise of Death Row Records; 50 Cent: No Holds Barred; Biggie Smalls: Ready to Die; Tupac: In the Studio as well as titles on R. Kelly, Jay-Z, the Black Eyed Peas, Red Hot Chili Peppers: In the Studio.

KANYE WEST
BEFORE THE LEGEND
The Rise of Kanye West

and The Chicago Rap and R&B Scene
By JAKE BROWN
Kanye West – Amazon Paperback
Kanye West – Amazon Kindle