Kanye might have left school, but he still values education. Here he’s performing at Santa Monica High School after teaming up with Musicland to help promote a national giveaway of $150K for a college education.
Years later, it became obvious that Kanye quitting college to pursue a music career proved to be a good move. Immediately after he dropped out, however, the move looked like a terrible one.
Kanye continued living at home with his mother after he quit school. To be allowed to do so, his upset mom said he had to get a job and pay rent. That was his well-educated mother’s punishment for him dropping out of college. Kanye was forced to get a job outside of music to pay the bill. He got several, including one as a telemarketer, and met his mom’s demands. When he was not working, Kanye continued to use his bedroom as a studio. His friends and musical partners came to the West home at all hours to work and hang out. Eventually this drove his mother crazy. She made a demand: either the music had to go or he did.
His mom’s mandate came at a good time for Kanye. He recently had begun earning some serious money off those deep-bassed beats that had rocked his mom’s house for nearly ten years. His first big payday came from Chicago rapper Gravity, aka Grav. Grav paid Kanye eight-thousand dollars for some of his tracks. Years later, Grav recalled the first time he met Kanye and heard his music. He was coming out of a concert, he said, when Kanye ran up to him. Grav had no clue who Kanye was, but Kanye convinced him to come to his car, a compact Nissan, to listen to his music. Grav was impressed and later told media he knew right then that Kanye was a musical prodigy.
Kanye might have left school, but he still values education. Here he’s performing at Santa Monica High School after teaming up with Musicland to help promote a national giveaway of $150K for a college education.
Those beats became Kanye’s first production credits and ended up on Grav’s 1996 album, Down to Earth. Kanye’s work was featured on several songs on that album, including “Sex,” which reached number twenty-nine on Billboard magazine’s Hot Rap Singles chart. Having a song on the charts was a grand achievement for any person. Kanye accomplished it when he was just nineteen years old. When Kanye quit college, he had told his parents it only would be for a year. If music did not work out in that period of time, he told them, he would return to school. After he sold his music to Grav, he knew returning to school would not be in the cards. “That’s when I knew the one-year plan was out the window,” he told Time magazine in 2005.
Kanye built upon the success of his songs with Grav. Soon, he signed a contract to produce records for Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie. That contract forbid Kanye from releasing his own solo record, which he desperately wanted to do. Because he could not do so, he joined a Chicago group called the Go-Getters. Kanye was the band’s fourth member and its producer. The Go-Getters had some modest local success, and Kanye occasionally was allowed to rap with the group.
Kanye rolls up to the Cannes Film Festival in a $1.7 million Mercedes SLR McLaren Stirling Moss. There were only seventy-five of these made.
Kanye soon moved out of the Chicago apartment he had rented after his mom kicked him out of the house. At that point, he decided he had achieved everything he could in Chicago. So Kanye left for the East Coast and found an apartment in New Jersey, across the water from New York City. That was the place he felt he needed to be to take the next step in his music career.
Kanye’s musical portfolio continued to grow. He produced beats for Ma$e, The Madd Rapper, Trina & Tamara, and other musicians. But none of those jobs were the “big break” he was looking for. At one point, he had almost gotten that break when Columbia Records flirted with offering him a contract. But the label eventually did not make Kanye an offer. The reason, as legend has it, was because Kanye claimed to Columbia executives that he was going to be bigger than Michael Jackson and producer-rapper Jermaine Dupri. Dupri turned out to be the son of one of Columbia’s executives with which Kanye was meeting. Columbia never called Kanye back.
Kanye’s big break finally came in 2000. That is when he connected with Jay-Z and his record label, Roc-A-Fella Records. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter already was a superstar by the time he and Kanye met. The Brooklyn, New York, native had released a handful of records on Roc-A-Fella, including Reasonable Doubt, which many critics felt was one of the best rap records of all time. Jay-Z was so hot that any musical project he had a hand in “turned to gold.”
Kanye’s first piece of that gold came when he produced the song “This Can’t Be Life,” for Jay-Z’s album, The Dynasty: Roc La Familia. The Dynasty became the top-selling album in the United States when it was released. So did the next Jay-Z album, 2001’s groundbreaking The Blueprint. Kanye played a much larger role on The Blueprint than he had on The Dynasty. He produced five songs for The Blueprint, including the popular single “Izzo (H.O.V.A).” It was Jay-Z’s first top-ten single. The song featured sped-up samples of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” Samples—borrowed parts of one artist’s songs—were a common device in the hip-hop industry. Sampling was a large part of Kanye’s work, too. His tendency was to borrow samples from soul and rhythm and blues artists from the 1960s. He oftentimes would play those samples faster than they were originally recorded, then record them again for use in his material.
After moving to the East Coast, Kanye eventually made his way to New York City where he became close friends with Jay-Z.
Kanye’s work with Jay-Z made him a sought-after producer. He produced songs for several Roc-A-Fella rappers as well as many other established, and up-and-coming, rappers, too. Kanye had become the successful musician he had dreamed about becoming since he was a teenager recording beats in his mom’s house in Chicago. But Kanye was not satisfied. He had another dream he had not yet met. He wanted to be the one whose name was on the front of the records. He told Sabotage Times in 2011, “I never really thought about [just] producing. No one really wanted to produce when I was young.… I was trying to rap. And I made beats because what else was I going to rap on?”
Kanye was making a living off music, but that was not enough for him. Kanye wanted to be the star.