James Delingpole James Delingpole

Enthralling and unusual – even if you don’t care about Kanye: Netflix’s Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy reviewed

A rare glimpse of an incredibly famous pop star before they're famous, when it still seems up in the air as to whether they will make it or not

Kanye West and his delightful, supportive mum Donda West in Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy. Image: Netflix © 2022 
issue 05 March 2022

The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music critic I saw an awful lot – was Kanye West at Glastonbury in 2015. Perhaps he was making some kind of ironic statement on the nature of celebrity and fan expectation: blinding lights all focused on himself; no attempts to engage with the crowd; relentless, mechanical rapping but with most of the amusing samples and catchy hooks removed, the better to punish us all by ordeal with loud, righteous verbiage.

But I still admire this irritating genius hugely because besides making often very addictive albums he refuses to play the game – publicly insulting the (supposedly) most squeaky clean star in the industry Taylor Swift, making nice (at least for a period) with President Trump, preferring to rap eloquently about quotidian experience (e.g. breaking his jaw in a serious car accident) rather than about the usual gangster fodder of gats and hos.

‘At least we can escape for a while from all the senseless violence on the news.’

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