Searching for Kanye
Kanye West is impossible to hold still in your mind. You find one stable thing about him—the production, the ear for samples, the way he rebuilt hip-hop from soul records and classical music—and then you remember the rest of it, the endless performing, the ego that swallows everything, and the verdict collapses. Everyone just picks a side. Either he’s a genius or he’s a charlatan. Nothing in between.
He came up producing for other people. The Blueprint with Jay-Z was the big one, early work with Common and John Legend. That’s where his sound came from, the thing that became recognizable—electronic and acoustic mixed together, soulful. It was distinctive and it worked. Hip-hop shifted toward it. Time magazine in 2005 put him down as one of the hundred most influential people alive.
British journalist Ben Zand made a documentary called Searching for Kanye, basically a half-hour of interviews tracing his life through music and fashion and celebrity, hitting the achievements and the disasters both. It leaves you nowhere. The question—who actually is he, genius or fraud—doesn’t resolve. You finish watching and you’re still stuck, which feels right. Some people are too big for neat biography. The contradiction is all they are.