Kanye West’s Quest for Recognition

Years ago, the filmmaker Coodie Simmons abandoned his dream of becoming a standup comedian to follow around a young rapper named Kanye West. The two met in 1998, when Simmons was the on-air correspondent for “Channel Zero,” a public-access show that he had co-created to document Chicago’s hip-hop scene. Simmons became West’s videographer soon afterward, and has since spent much of his life watching—and, in some ways, creating—Kanye West. His years of accumulated footage are the basis for “Jeen-yuhs,” a three-part docuseries on Netflix, which charts the rapper’s spectacular (and often painful) ascent. Simmons is both a narrator and a participant in the story, implicated not only by his camerawork but by the fact that he was one of the earliest believers in West’s wild ambitions. In this way, the series is also a document of an unusual on-and-off friendship, told across more than two decades.

The documentary’s first two and a half hours follow West not as a star but as a striver trying to persuade everyone else to see him as one. (Through a quality you could call hubris or intuition, West invited Simmons to start recording behind-the-scenes footage for a documentary long before he released his first album.) The first and second episodes, subtitled “Vision” and “Purpose,” chronicle his journey from production phenom, in 1998, to Grammy Award-winning rapper, in 2005. Simmons convincingly shows the precarity of West’s early career, and the blind self-esteem that carried him through. The first episode shows the rapper arriving uninvited to the offices of Roc-A-Fella Records, hoping to be heard by anyone. (At this point, he was an unsigned producer for the label, and wasn’t taken seriously as a rap prospect.) He shuffles from room to room, turning off whatever music is playing and replacing it with his demo; he awkwardly raps lyrics from what would eventually become his single “All Falls Down.” West doesn’t get the response he’s looking for, but that doesn’t stop him from pulling a similar stunt in the hotel room of Dame Dash, the label’s president, only to receive the same treatment.

The real subject of “Jeen-yuhs” is the rare, nearly monomaniacal focus that West has become notorious for. He pursues opportunity and validation at nearly every turn, constantly straining to parlay his freestyles into something bigger. We often see him sitting studiously before a beat machine or a soundboard, working as other people stir in the background. Even the setbacks are incorporated into the grander scheme. In 2002, West was in an accident that shattered his jaw. The injury, which threatened to end his rap career, became fuel for a song called “Through the Wire.” He gets Simmons to film one of his dentist appointments—that way, he can use the footage for the music video.

One of the most affecting developments in the series is West’s journey to “Def Poetry Jam,” which he auditions for in an act of defiance against his indifferent record label. In his audition tape, recorded by Simmons, West raps drafts of early songs directly into the camera, his flow ragged but spirited. He becomes more composed in the weeks before the show, performing a verse in progress that the rapper Mos Def co-signs. When West finally hits the stage, presenting “Self Conscious,” an a-cappella rendition of lyrics from “All Falls Down,” he seems like a star in the making for the first time.

As “The College Dropout,” West’s début album, comes together, the energy gradually starts to change, and we see more people’s opinions of the rapper begin to sync up with his view of himself. Simmons asks celebrities what they think of West, eagerly collecting testimonies of other converts. In one endearing moment, the Houston legend Scarface acknowledges West’s talent as a rapper and then chastises him for removing his mouth guard, which West had set gently on the console before them to perform his verse. The litany of triumphs culminates in Dame Dash finally committing to West’s début. (The exec was convinced after seeing the initial screening of the “Through the Wire” video, with the footage from the dentist’s office.)

The series never presents any cohesive theory of creative genius, nor does it make a case for West as such a figure. In a way, it posits that West’s real gift is his infectious self-conviction. A few of West’s associates have stayed by his side the whole time (or most of it). Rhymefest, a sideman who proffers his theories of genius in early footage (“Who are you to call yourself a genius?”), is still with him during his doomed Presidential campaign. Simmons, who lost touch with West for several years, makes it seem like he would have done the same if he could have. Other high-profile characters, such as John Legend and Olskool Ice-Gre, step in and out of his orbit. In the course of the documentary’s five and a half hours, we meet a whole roster of people—Mos Def and Pharrell Williams among them—whose collaboration and endorsement have created the artist we know now. Maybe genius isn’t genius until people start buying in.

Simmons finds a counterpoint to the hypemen in West’s mother, Donda. In a handful of intimate vignettes, captured inside her apartment, in West’s childhood home, and during promotional events for her charity, she comes across as a centering influence in the rapper’s life. (It is clear that Simmons, like many, sees her death as the catalyst for the messy years that have followed.) Crucially, she appears as both the source of the rapper’s confidence and a grounding force that keeps his confidence in check. In one scene, Donda offers her son a prescient warning: “It be important to remember that the giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing.”

The third and final episode of the series, titled “Awakening,” diverts from the first two in tone and content. It covers a much longer span, including the six years when Simmons and West drifted apart. It was during that time—2008 to 2014—that West became the biggest rapper in the world. With Simmons now a distant spectator, like everyone else, this part of the series leans more heavily on TV and concert footage that charts West’s tumultuous rise, a jeering montage of segments that present West as unstable—the Taylor Swift incident, the President Obama comment, the BBC rant. (Simmons, for his part, notes that this is the first time West had “lost the people.”) We learn, too, about Simmons—his daughter’s birth, the last time he saw his father, the development of his directing career—and what he did in his years without West. Here, the work reveals itself as a story of proximity to stardom, and not just stardom itself.

By the time the two reunite, in a get-together orchestrated by Ice-Gre, we can see that the dynamic has shifted. The rapper, once desperate for outside approval, is now the only voice that matters. West barely reacts to Simmons’s attempts to engage with him, or even to gauge how and what he is feeling. The episode shows that the collaborative atmosphere, which powered the success of “The College Dropout,” is no longer a function of West’s process. People are always around, but there seems to be less community. Near the end, we see him shushing all encroaching criticism from unseen associates as he watches Tucker Carlson endorse his chaotic 2020 Presidential rally on Fox News. The dissenting voices quickly fall silent, and you can practically see the vindication surging through the rapper’s body as he receives the exact reaction he’s been looking for.

Simmons seems conflicted about the figure he helped create. He appears to find some comfort, and even hope, in West rediscovering his Christianity and dedicating his tenth album to his mother. But the work shakes off any stable conclusions: it is impossible to forget that the story is unresolved, that its subject is volatile, even dangerous. By the third act, the rapper’s mental illness is not just apparent but unavoidable; he becomes prone to rambling outbursts and dramatic mood swings. It’s in “Awakening” that Simmons begins cutting the camera mid-monologue, saying it feels wrong to record the rapper in such a state. This comes across as both a kindness and a disposal of evidence. One of Simmons’s final recordings follows West in a meeting with the designer Tina Frey, during which the rapper rattles off a list of completely ridiculous objectives. “I just feel that this crew that’s coming together is going to change education, change sanitation, change meditation, change the way we think, the way we connect with the earth, the way we connect with God,” he begins, and then the footage starts to fade out.