Kanye West Thesis

Kanye West

Kanye Omari West is an american rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, fashion designer and entrepreneur. Kanye had a successful career so far he had a great early life and mid life throughout his music career.

West was born on june 8, 1977, Atlanta Georgia, he grew up in the South Shore of Chicago. His parents got divorced when he was three years old, his mother raised him in Chicago and the summers he spent it with his father. He first started to write poetry when he was five years old, when he was in the third grade he figured out he had a passion for art and music. While growing up in Chicago he got involved with hip-hop dancing, he began rapping in the third grade. When he got to the seventh grade he began to write

music and he would sell them to other artist. His first rap song was “ Green Eggs and Ham”. He persuade his mother to pay twenty-five dollars an hour so he could be in a studio recording his music. After graduating high school kanye received a scholarship for Chicago’s american academy of art, that's when he began to take painting classes. At twenty years old he dropped out of college because his schedule was getting in the way of him pursuing his music career. His mother was not very happy about him dropping out, but she finally understood that college is not for everyone and you do not have to go to college to pursue great goals in life.“Kanye West began his early production career in the mid-1990s, making beats primarily for burgeoning local artists, eventually developing a style that involved speeding up vocal samples from classic soul records. His first official production credits came at the age of nineteen when he produced eight tracks on Down to Earth, the 1996 debut album of a Chicago rapper named Grav.”(Kanye, 2018) After he noticed he did not wanna bet he back room boy that he wanted to be the head line of his own music, all the other rappers believed that he was not “gangster” enough to be a true rapper from Chicago. All because he was a classy middle class kid that wore pink polo shirts with Gucci loafers. When he tried to rap with Roc-A-Fella an get recordings with him Jay-Z started to get a little jealous and state that Kanye was not suited to be a rapper with all the other rappers. Jay-Z would say some harsh things to the time magazine and his mother would have to leave out of meetings because he was crying. After all that he finally signed to Roc-A-Fella in 2002.
His father Ray, was a photojournalist for the Atlanta newspaper but he was also active in the Black Panthers. Later in the years he became a Christian counselor. Donda on the other hand was a professor in the English department at Chicago State University. Then she became Kanye’s manager after he figured out he did not wanna be the back room player, before she passed away at the age of fifty-eight years old from a heart disease after she had cosmetic surgery in the year of 2007. His mother raised him as a middle class man, when he was ten years old him and his mother moved to China so she could teach at a University Exchange Program.
Kanye moved to New York 2001, and that's when he got his first production with Jay-Z in the song, “This Can't Be Life”.

“Here he got his big break handling the production for the Jay Z track "This Can't Be Life," which appeared on the 2000 album Dynasty: Roc La Familia” (A&E,2018). The following year he started to produce more, he produced in four songs of Jay-Z ,then he had produced in songs for Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Ludacris, Alicia Keys and Beyoncé. He then wrote and recorded a song called “Through the Wire” were its about his head on collision and how his jaw was shattered. After he finished his first album by himself it was leaned online. In his opinion he knew he could do. Better so he added a little more instruments to his music and he hired people to play different things so it could sound better to not just him but to his soon to be fans. His next album that he released in February 2004 was called “College Dropout” he sold two point six million copies and that's what made him a star. Everyone said that I broke the record of gangsta-rap, in that whole album he had all kinds of different things to rap about including racism, education, beliefs. “Mr. West has had the most sui generis hip-hop career of the last decade. No rapper has embodied hip-hop’s often contradictory impulses of narcissism and social good quite as he has, and no producer has celebrated the lush and the ornate quite as he has” (New York Times,2018). Many people did not think he would become famous as

sooner than they thought. The next album he produced took a year and two million dollars, he had celebrities working with him that has never even thought about working with a rapper. He took the top three hottest songs that were popular in the two thousands and made a remix of some sort of them with the artist. All he wanted to do was prove that he could reach higher than the goals he set for himself.
September of 2005, a month after “ Late Registrations” released he was on NBC broadcast to raise funds for everyone that was suffering from Hurricane Katrina.

Sooner or later he was inspired to make his hip-hop more anthemic, he believed that he should be performing in Stadiums and arenas. Performing in stadiums and arenas influenced him to write and produce another album called “ graduation” which was released in September 11, 2007. This album had a palette of layered electronic synthesizers with sloganeering wordplay. The graduation album sold nine thousand five hundred copies in the first six days of it being released. Kanye was on top of the world he was the actual rapper that killed gangster rap. When his mother died in 2007 tragedy struck. During his first concert following his mother's funeral he dedicated a song called “hey mama”. He released another album twelve months after his mother passed, a whole album of grief ,pain and

alienation.
Kanye had many awards, he got twenty-one grammy awards and he got thirty-four million albums sold. No rapper in the united states has won more awards as kanye has in his career. During one of the grammy awards kanye and Taylor Swift had a breakdown. He went on the stage while Taylor Swift was accepting her grammy award and stated that Beyonce should have won instead. Then they became friends years later but again he tried to take credit of her becoming famous and when she won another grammy award she stated “Swift hit back from the stage at the 2016 Grammy Awards — this time uninterrupted — with the words: "I want to say to all the young women out there: There will be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments... Don't let those people sidetrack you"(Rolli,2018).
Kanye West had a very successful career he may have had some up and downs including his breakdown with Taylor, but he got through everything and still is going with his great career.