by Sean Smith
After college, Ray followed his first love of photography, winning awards and setting up his own business in his home town of Atlanta. One of his regular contracts was shooting pictures for Spelman College, the liberal arts women’s university. He met Donda when she worked in the public relations department of the historically black institution. She was subsidising her studies for a master’s degree at Atlanta University.
They married three months after their first date. At first, they both took teaching jobs. Ray taught photography and media production at one college, while she taught English and speech at another. They both decided to pursue further education and lived in married quarters at Auburn University in Alabama, where he obtained a master’s in audiovisual studies and media, while she studied for a doctorate in English.
Their marriage faltered after Kanye was born, with Ray apparently devoting too much time to photography and not enough to family life. When their son was 11 months old, they separated amicably. Ray would remain in Kanye’s life, but his mother basically raised him as a single parent and was by far the most significant and influential person in his development.
Donda and Ray’s son would grow up to be imaginative visually and verbally – an impressive combination of their talents. On ‘Talk About Love’, for instance, he wrote and performed the middle rap, produced the track and devised the concept for the video, in which he appeared in a cameo role alongside Ray J, with whom Kim had just made the sex tape.
When Kanye was three, his mother decided their life needed a complete change. Encouraged by a boyfriend, she secured a job at Chicago State University and moved to Illinois. Kanye was a precociously talented child with a mother thoughtful and intelligent enough to encourage her son in the way that she thought would best prepare him for the world. She wanted to ensure that he had high self-esteem and believed in himself. She wrote, ‘I began teaching him to love himself. It’s something I felt I must consciously do . . . As a black man and as a man period, he would need to be strong.’
Many of the values that Donda tried to instil in her son were the same ones that Kim’s parents advocated for her: honesty, integrity and a strong work ethic. They attended church every Sunday at the Christ Universal Temple on South Ashland Avenue. She ensured he still saw Ray, spending summer holidays with his father and grandparents. Ray had become more religious-minded over the years and church was a compulsory event for his son whenever he visited. Sometimes they would speak on the telephone and say a prayer or two together before ending their conversation. Ray eventually gave up his job as a photographer and moved to Maryland to work as a Christian counsellor.
Donda’s desire to build her son’s confidence probably lay the foundation for what many perceive to be arrogance in the adult Kanye. His inner certainty allowed him to express his creative ideas from an early age. Even at three, he was thinking outside the box. His mother would tell him a banana was yellow, but he would draw one with his crayons and then colour it purple, because that’s how he wanted it to look.
Kanye’s self-confidence was evident when he sat an exam for elementary school. He was asked to draw a man, a task he found too dull and easy, so he told the examiners he would draw a man and put him in a football uniform. He passed the test easily and was accepted at the Vanderpoel Elementary Magnet School on South Prospect Avenue, which had a solid reputation for encouraging artistic children.
While there, Kanye began to take an interest in fashion and would sketch designs for the outfits he was going to produce when he had his own fashion label. Up until then, he had been quite happy to let his mother choose his clothes, usually from budget stores – on her salary, she had to be careful not to overindulge her child. She ignited his interest in the way he looked, however, by buying him his first pair of Air Jordans when he was 10. They cost $65, so it was an extravagant gift.
Donda broadened his education by taking him on trips around the US. They went to Washington, DC – not just to see the White House, but to tour the Smithsonian Institution as well. When they went to St Louis, they visited the zoo to have fun, but she wanted her son to appreciate the Gateway Arch, the awe-inspiring monument that had become the internationally recognisable symbol of the city. As a professor of English, she travelled abroad, but couldn’t take Kanye with her. In 1987, she was offered a year teaching in China as part of an exchange between Nanjing University and Chicago State. She was going to turn down the opportunity before she was assured her son could go with her too.
China was an incredible experience for a young boy. Kanye would cycle eight blocks to school, where he was the centre of attention as the only black student. The others would come up and rub his face to see if his colour would come off on their hands. Stereotypically, because he was black, they wanted him to breakdance – fortunately, it was something at which he excelled. He was happy to oblige, but only in return for a lamb kebab. Even at the age of 10, he understood when he had something of value. He possessed an entrepreneurial spirit.
The one drawback during an adventurous year, in which he also travelled to Hong Kong and Thailand, was that his lack of fluency in the language held him back in class. He stayed in a lower grade until Donda decided to home school him. On his return to the US, he had to sit some exams to find his correct level of re-entry and performed so well that the school didn’t believe the results and thought his mother must have helped him. He had to take the exams again with an invigilator standing over him. Once again, he excelled.
While he never got into serious trouble at school, he did embarrass his mother when he took a pornographic magazine in one day and got caught passing it around among his friends. When a teacher demanded to know where he had obtained the porn, he said he had found it in his mum’s closet. She wanted the floor to open up and swallow her after she was summoned to the school and told what had happened. Kanye has admitted a healthy interest in sex from a young age, which included watching a hard porn movie on his VCR when he was 14. His unimpressed mother made him write an essay entitled ‘The Impact of Watching X-Rated Movies on a Teenage Boy’. The project didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the opposite sex, but did teach him the benefits of proper research and preparation.
By the age of 12, he had become totally preoccupied with the way he looked. His mother, tongue in cheek, said he became Mr Style Guru. As a schoolboy, he even did his own washing and ironing to ensure he looked immaculate at all times. Once, when she gave him $200 to stock up on clothes for the new school term, he came home with just two shirts and one pair of jeans. Even then, his tastes were expensive.
He was also becoming obsessed with styling. Donda recalled, ‘It was like a light went on inside of him and he poured the same kind of energy that he put into his art and music into putting outfits together and dressing well. It came without effort.’ At 15, he even took over his mother’s styling: ‘He’d critique whatever I was wearing, whenever I had some place to go. Sometimes he’d be kind. Other times, cruel.’
At school, he formed a group called Quadro Posse with three friends. Kanye was responsible for the styling. He preferred everything to be coordinated. When they entered a school talent competition, which they won, he had decided that they all should dress completely in black. He was careful to make sure his shoes were exactly right, telling his mother, ‘You can mess up a dope outfit with shoes.’
It’s so easy to see that he and Kim are absolutely soulmates. If they had joined a dating agency, they would have been matched immediately and told to get married.
Kanye had moved on from Vanderpoel to Polaris High School in the affluent south-western Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn. It was demanding academically, but Kanye coped relatively easily. His teachers recall that he was prone to speaking first without thinking of the consequences of what he said. One of his teachers, Dr Carol Baker, recalled that he was easily distracted, often doodling, drawing or writing rather than paying attention: ‘Back then I would have called it poetry, but it was really rap.’
His mother was deter
mined that he receive the education he needed to be successful. ‘She was the kind of mum who would pull him by the ear and drag him down the hallway if necessary,’ said Dr Baker. ‘I never saw her do that, but she was that kind of mum.’
One pursuit Donda was happy to encourage was Kanye’s love of music. He was fiercely ambitious at a young age. His PE teacher Marilyn Gannon remembered him as a ‘small kid with big dreams’, who used to tell her almost daily that he was going to be the best rapper in the world. She invariably replied, ‘OK, Kanye, you can get in line now.’
The characteristic that set Kanye apart from his contemporaries is an appreciation of all kinds of music. He used to impersonate Stevie Wonder at talent contests when he was a boy and often did well. He listened to proper singer-songwriters, like George Michael, Phil Collins and Michael Jackson. His favourite group was Red Hot Chili Peppers. Later, he became known for bringing many diverse elements into his music.
He wrote his first proper rap song at the age of 13. He was inspired by a favourite Dr Seuss book to compose ‘Green Eggs and Ham’. He persuaded his mother to pay $25 an hour to give him enough time to record the song in a small basement studio, which was hardly high tech – the microphone was suspended from the ceiling by a wire coat hanger. Nothing from that version has ever been made public, but it was a start.
At 14, he bought his first keyboard with his own savings of $500 and the $1,000 his indulgent mother had given him as a Christmas present. From then on, he lived for his keyboard and the beats he could create on it. In mainstream pop music, a beat would be the instrumental track upon which the vocal would sit. In hip-hop, it would be the track, often using samples from other songs, on which the rap would be laid down. Kanye associated with a leading young hip-hop producer called No I.D., who took him under his wing after an introduction engineered by their mums, who both worked at Chicago State.
Like Kim Kardashian in Los Angeles, Kanye took on work as a teenager to afford the clothes he wanted, to run his battered Nissan car and to chase girls. He sold knives door to door and worked as a greeter outside a Gap store to try and encourage young black people to go inside. He made up raps to entertain passers-by: ‘Welcome to the Gap. We got jeans in the back . . .’
On leaving high school, he won a scholarship to study at the American Academy of Art, but was more interested in his music. He changed to English literature at Chicago State, where his mum was now head of the department, but didn’t enjoy that either. He dropped out of college, which was obviously a huge disappointment to his mother. Her concern was eased when he sold a set of beats to the well-known Chicago rapper Gravity for $8,800.
Donda took early retirement from her job to move with her son to New York, where there were greater opportunities, and took on the role of Kanye’s manager. She was, in fact, a ‘momager’ before Kris Jenner took on that role for her children. He attracted the interest of Jay Z and made his breakthrough to the major league when he produced five tracks on the master rapper’s 2001 million-seller The Blueprint. Practically overnight Kanye was one of the biggest producers in the US, but he was frustrated at being unable to perform his own material. Dapper and short of stature, he lacked the menace of the gangsta rappers who dominated the hip-hop scene at the time.
He continued to write, composing two of the tracks that would become Kanye classics, ‘Jesus Walks’ and ‘Hey Mama’. The latter was a tribute to his mother, who had always given her son’s well-being and happiness priority over her own personal relationships. Eventually Roc-A-Fella’s co-founder, Damon Dash, signed him as a recording artist and he flew to Los Angeles to make an album.
He nearly didn’t finish it. After a late night at the studio, he fell asleep at the wheel of his rented Lexus and was fortunate to escape with his life. His airbag failed to open and his face smashed into the steering wheel, causing horrendous fractures to his jaw and nose. His girlfriend, Sumeke Rainey, and his mother were on the first flight from Newark to be at his bedside in Cedars-Sinai.
His relationship with Sumeke is the quiet one he seldom speaks of, but they dated for seven years and she hasn’t used that fact to gain any fame since. She sang lyrics on an occasional song, but, more importantly, her father gave Kanye a box of old soul singles that he went through carefully and methodically, and used for sampling on his early recordings. He is also said to have told her dying father that he would marry Sumeke some day – something that didn’t happen.
The number of people in Kim’s story affected by bad road accidents is almost beyond belief. Khloé had her bad teenage smash; Kris Jenner’s natural father was killed in one; Bruce’s brother was another fatality; Lamar Odom’s chauffeur-driven car was involved in a fatal accident in New York in 2011; Bruce himself would be involved in a crash in 2014, in which his Cadillac hit the back of another car, resulting in the death of its occupant. And then there was Kanye, who was lucky to be alive.
He was in hospital for two weeks, only able to take sustenance through a straw, as his shattered jaw had to be wired together. It could have been much worse. His escape was a life-changing moment, as his songs became more self-aware and honest. Up until that time, he had been trying to be unrealistically tough in both his lyrics and his music, because that was the fashion. He wrote and recorded a breakthrough song called ‘Through the Wire’, which he sang literally through gritted teeth.
He wrote it in the hospital and, as he usually did with his songs, simply remembered it. He didn’t need to write the lyric down. He rapped about half his jaw being in the back of his mouth. He speeded up a sample of a 1984 big ballad by Chaka Khan called ‘Through the Fire’, which had originally been produced by David Foster. Kanye recorded it at the Record Plant studio with the wire still in his jaw. When Chaka agreed for her vocal to be used, she had no idea that he was going to speed it up and ‘make me sound like a chipmunk’.
When the song was eventually released in September 2003, it was a top 20 hit in both the US and the UK. More importantly, it revealed that Kanye was the exception to the rule that producers don’t make good rappers. The video, which he financed himself, won Video of the Year at the 2004 Source Hip-Hop Awards.
The track was the cornerstone of his debut album, The College Dropout, which sold 3.4 million copies in the US and gained him a reputation as one of the leading rap artists of his generation. It won Best Rap Album at the Grammy Awards, the first of 21 he has won, making him the most successful modern artist at the prestigious annual ceremony. The second single, ‘Slow Jamz’ with Twista and Jamie Foxx, provided Kanye with his first number one. The New York Times described The College Dropout as a ‘concept album about quitting school, a playful collection of party songs and a 76-minute orgy of nose-thumbing.’
Kanye made the jump to the front pages of the newspapers in September 2005, during a telethon raising funds for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He began with some home truths about the victims. He said that a white family would be portrayed in the media as looking for food, whereas a black family would be described as looting. He ended with a simple observation that was heard throughout the world: ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people.’ He hadn’t planned to say it, but let an impulse rule his head. It would be the first of many controversial moments.
Donda West was proud of her son’s outspoken honesty. Mindful of the battle against racial prejudice that she had witnessed all her life, she believed he had spoken the truth. She moved from the East Coast to the West to be with her son. First, she had been there to help him convalesce following his near-fatal accident; then she stayed on to look after his affairs. She was chief executive of West Brands, LLC, the parent company of Kanye’s business concerns. She chaired the Kanye West Foundation, an educational non-profit organisation, which sought to decrease dropout rates and improve literacy. She was also the person whose opinion mattered most to him.
She died suddenly and unexpectedly in Beverly Hills in November 2007, the day after she had undergone cosmetic surgery, which i
ncluded breast reduction and liposuction. She was 58. The coroner said that the final manner of death could not be determined, but stated that ‘multiple post-operative factors could have played a role in the death’. His opinion, though, was that she died from some pre-existing coronary artery disease.
Kanye was devastated. Before she died, she had written a book entitled Raising Kanye: Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar, in which she described her love and admiration for her son. The affection was mutual. He was devastated by her death.
He was in the middle of a tour in Europe and cancelled some dates, but a week later, in Paris, had to be helped off stage when he was about to sing ‘Hey Mama’. He took time away to grieve, but returned at the Grammys in February 2008. This time he sang an emotional version of the song, and had the word MAMA shaved into his head.
Kim’s father, Robert Kardashian, was a year older than Donda when he died. That sense of loss would be a common bond between Kanye and Kim. She said simply, ‘I can really relate to his mother’s passing. He can really relate to my father’s passing.’ Surely it was only a matter of time before they realised they were made for each other.
17
FANCY SEEING YOU HERE
The story of Kim and Kanye’s love affair should be made into a Hollywood rom-com. The audience would be secure in the knowledge that they would eventually end up together, despite a series of relationships with other people that kept them apart for years. Her sister Khloé was always telling Kim that he should be her husband.
When they first met, she was involved with Ray J and technically married to Damon Thomas. Kanye, too, was attached – he was still with Sumeke. Their long relationship fizzled out when he moved to Los Angeles. She is acknowledged as a vocalist on two tracks from The College Dropout, but doesn’t feature on the follow-up, Late Registration, a year later.