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There is a scene in the first episode of Netflix's Kanye West documentary – or is it Kanye West's Netflix documentary? – jeen-yuhs, where we get a ringside seat to one of the earlier feuds of the musician's career. A fellow Chicago rapper has trash talked him on a radio show, and West enters a depressed stupor as a rift between him and his old friend opens up before his eyes. “You need a hug man,” says another friend on seeing him standing dejectedly on the street trying, quietly trying to make amends.
It is strange to see a man who has marketed himself as a towering ego who lives for conflict so easily wounded, but in jeen-yuhs we see Kanye before Kanye West, and long before his more recent shift still to Ye.
The documentary began in a different form over 20 years ago, when now-director Coodie Simmons, of hip-hop Channel 0 fame, turned the camera on West with the hunch he was witnessing a star on the rise. As such jeen-yuhs is a treasure trove of old footage, starting when the rapper was 19 and capturing him laughing at home with his mother, or laying down beats for the records that would make him a household name. One scene, in which he plays “All Falls Down” to a bemused marketing executive, as her colleagues wander in and our the room, feels like a hip-hop equivalent of the scene from Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary, where Paul McCartney's bandmates chill while he casually hammers “Get Back” together for the first time.
At first, Simmons's premonition about West falters, and as such much of the first chapter of jeen-yuhs is concerned with Kanye trying to get people to take him seriously as an artist. In 2001, riding high on the Grammy nomination he had earned producing for Jay Z, West had left his native Chicago for New York, and was spending time bouncing around the office of hip-hop royalty label Roc-a-Fella, rapping energetically at anyone who worked there in the hope that somebody would hear what he was trying to say. In one moment which would likely make the deity that is present day West implode, he arrives for a label meeting to hear the receptionist announce that 'Cayenne West' is here for a meeting.
What makes the old footage so compelling is it was never meant to be candid, making the performance West is practising fascinating to watch. At one point he stops himself revealing too much of his game plan, realising he shouldn't be so open, in another he wonders if doing the documentary is “a little narcissistic”, before adding, “fuck it”. Jeen-yuhs, then, is not so much who Kanye West is when nobody is watching but who he becomes with an audience.
Unlike the current string of celebrity-produced music documentaries, which offer little beyond staged access and false revelations, jeen-yuhs catches Kanye in moments of genuine vulnerability from his past. There is a sense of West having to prove his achievements, often talking of how young he started producing and his “breaking down the barriers for everybody”. The repeated assertion that he is a producer and not an artist, one that Jay Z reportedly parroted too, frames him as someone desperate to prove himself as a singular talent, perhaps in part responsible for where he has ended up.
With the documentary released the same week that West had a truck of roses delivered to his estranged wife Kim Kardashian West, the latest in a string of troubling stories, it's hard not to wonder if the limelight and recognition he craved has been worth it or if he flew too close to the sun.
With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see forewarnings of the man Kanye would become in jeen-yuhs, but his mother Donda seems to have a sense of how fragile his ego is in the before time, saying to him in a kind but warning voice: “The giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing.”
