For those who have lately struggled with creative irregularity, but perhaps, above all, the ups and downs as a public figure of kanye-west (now only Ye), the documentary ‘jeen-yuhs’ be emotional reunion with another version of the rapper, producer and fashion designer: one moved by the purest desire to leave a mark, to corroborate that in Chicago they also know how to rap, to be great by doing greatness.
That’s the old Kanye we see in this first act, titled ‘Vision’ because with a vision great stories begin, according to the co-director Clarence Simmons (alias coodie) in the ‘off’ narration. Coodie started capturing Ye on digital video a couple of decades ago. He wanted to make a kind of hip hop version of ‘Hoop dreams’, that glorious documentary in which Steve James followed two black teenagers for five years in their fight to get out of poverty through basketball.
Coodie (joined by another director, Chike Ozah) ended up following Ye for 22 years, or 13 if we subtract the nine (2007-2016) in which, after the death of Donda, Kanye’s mother, the brotherhood suffered a temporary rupture.
The title ‘Vision’ may refer to Kanye’s visionary character, but it’s also a way of remembering that ‘jeen-yuhs’ it does not aspire to be an objective, exhaustive and historicist documentary about its subject of study. Everything is filtered by the subjective vision of Coodie, your own life path and your emotion; one could say that sometimes almost excessively. It’s important for Coodie to contextualize, but the documentary really starts to grab attention when Kanye enters the scene, first as a guest at rapper Jermaine Dupri’s birthday party.
Back then, in 1998, West was the ‘beatmaker’ everyone loved in Chicago. In the early 2000s he had moved to New York and produced for Jay Z a hit the size of ‘Izzo (HOVA)’, but what he wanted was to make his own album. After producing four tracks (plus one hidden) from ‘The blueprint’, he set his sights on the Roc-A-Fella label, which he ended up on, but not before suffering some pretty graphic moments of disinterest and rejection.
‘jeen-yuhs’ is like hip-hop nutters’ ‘The Beatles: Get back’: Rarely have we had such intimate, almost obscenely intimate access to an artist his size.. We meet a self-confident but vulnerable West, two hundred percent human, who doesn’t hesitate to put on and take off his orthodontics in front of the camera, sometimes leaving it where he shouldn’t, as the legendary rapper reproaches him Scarface in the studio before, thank God, telling him that ‘Family business’ is “incredible”.
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But if something validates Kanye, it is the comments of Donda, a proud mother of her son, who knows perfectly some of his rhymes. The mother-daughter scenes of ‘jeen-yuhs’ are transcendental and serve to relocate West’s subsequent path, from his most notorious public disasters to his hyper-religious latest album, simply titled ‘Donda’.
This first act ends with Ye on the verge of the top, about to release a first album (‘The college dropout’) that would only be the first of several masterpieces. There are still peaks to come, but also his clash with Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, his dubious approach to Donald Trump (remember that he wore a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat) or his sad 2020 presidential campaign . Everything indicates that the next deliveries will be more frustrating than emotional, but in any case enlightening.