The story of Kanye West

A professor's son from Chicago

Kanye Omari West was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on the eighth of June 1977. His father, Ray West, was a former Black Panther and one of the first Black photojournalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His mother, Donda West, was an English professor. Donda had grown up in Oklahoma City, and as a girl of nine she had joined her father, a civil rights activist, in a 1958 sit in at a downtown drug store. Kanye's parents separated when he was three, and Donda took her son to Chicago, where she would spend twenty seven years at Chicago State University, eventually chairing its English department. It was a middle class home, and she raised him to speak his mind.[1] [2]

When Kanye was ten, his mother won a Fulbright post teaching at Nanjing University, and she took him to China for a year. By her account he was the only foreigner in his class, but he settled in and picked up the language quickly, although he has since forgotten most of it. Creativity came early. He was writing poems at five, rapping by the third grade, and by the seventh grade he was making his own beats, which he was soon selling to other artists. In Chicago he fell in with an older producer called No I.D., who became a friend and a mentor. No I.D. introduced the teenager to serious production, invited him to sessions with the rapper Common, and later connected him with the people who would give him his first deal.[1] [2]

After high school, Kanye won a scholarship to Chicago's American Academy of Art in 1997 and took painting classes. He soon moved to Chicago State University to study English, where his mother was a professor. At twenty he dropped out to chase music full time. Donda was disappointed at first, but she came round and backed him completely. Years later she described how she had raised him to think critically and never be afraid to say what he felt. The dropout became a theme he would turn into a brand. His first three albums would be named after stages of a college education, and in 2015 an art school in Chicago finally gave him an honorary doctorate.[1] [2] [3]

Through the middle of the 1990s Kanye made beats for local Chicago rappers. His first official credits came at nineteen, when he produced eight tracks on Down to Earth, a 1996 album by the underground rapper Grav. In 1998 he became the first producer signed to a management company called Hip Hop Since 1978, run by Gee Roberson and Kyambo Joshua. For a while he also worked as a ghost producer for Deric Angelettie, known as D-Dot, which blocked him from releasing a solo record. So he formed a Chicago group called the Go-Getters, who put out one album, World Record Holders, in 1999. That same year he produced a track for Foxy Brown's number one album Chyna Doll.[1] [2]

The producer who wanted the microphone

In 2000 Kanye became an in house producer at Roc-A-Fella Records, the label run by Jay-Z and Damon Dash. His first work with Jay-Z was a song called This Can't Be Life on The Dynasty album. Then came The Blueprint, released on the eleventh of September 2001, with four tracks produced by Kanye. His signature sound was nicknamed chipmunk soul. He took old soul records, sped them up so the voices rose in pitch, and chopped them over hard drums. The Blueprint is often credited with reviving Jay-Z's career, and it made Kanye one of the most wanted producers in hip hop. Soon he was making beats for Ludacris, Alicia Keys and Janet Jackson as well.[1] [2] [3] [4]

But Kanye did not want to stay behind the mixing desk. He wanted to rap, and the industry was not interested. Record companies saw a preppy middle class kid who did not fit the gangster image that ruled mainstream rap. Capitol Records came close to signing him, then backed out. Even at Roc-A-Fella, Jay-Z later admitted, people saw him as a producer first. In the end Damon Dash signed him reluctantly, mainly to stop him going to a rival label. Kanye kept working anyway, building beats in a two bedroom apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a home studio in one room. He carried old disks and demos around in a Louis Vuitton backpack.[1] [2] [3]

Then, on the twenty third of October 2002, everything nearly ended. Kanye left a Los Angeles studio at around three in the morning, where he had been producing for Beanie Sigel, Peedi Crakk and the Black Eyed Peas. Driving a rented Lexus, he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed. At Cedars-Sinai hospital his shattered jaw was wired shut in reconstructive surgery. Two weeks later, with the wires still in, he went into the Record Plant and recorded a song about the crash. He called it Through the Wire, a play on Chaka Khan's Through the Fire, which he sampled. It first appeared on his mixtape Get Well Soon in December 2002.[1] [2] [3]

The crash also led to an unlikely hit. While he was recovering, Kanye went to a party thrown by the actor Jamie Foxx, who was trying to break into music. Kanye performed a freestyle that impressed Foxx, and invited him to the studio. The song they made was Slow Jamz, a love letter to old soul records, built on a sped up Luther Vandross sample, with Chicago's fast talking rapper Twista taking the big verse. Released in late 2003, it went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, a first for all three men. Through the Wire had come out as Kanye's debut single that autumn and climbed to number fifteen. He paid for its video himself.[1] [2] [3]

The College Dropout and Late Registration

The College Dropout arrived on the tenth of February 2004, after three delays. It had leaked months earlier, and Kanye used the time to rework it, adding string arrangements, gospel choirs, new verses and sharper drums. Two weeks before the deadline he recruited his older cousin, the singer Tony Williams, who had impressed him by improvising over a track during a car ride. Tony ended up on five songs in one weekend. The album debuted at number two, selling 441,000 copies in its first week. Instead of gang stories, Kanye rapped about college, dead end jobs, money worries, family and faith, with jokes and self doubt mixed in. It sounded like nobody else in the charts.[1] [2]

The boldest song was Jesus Walks, built on a marching gospel choir. Record executives had told him a song that openly praised Jesus would never get on the radio. It went top twenty, came with three separate music videos, and won the Grammy for Best Rap Song. The album earned ten Grammy nominations and won Best Rap Album. That same year Kanye launched his own label, GOOD Music, with the Ohio singer John Legend and the Chicago rapper Common among its first signings. With his mother he had already set up the Kanye West Foundation in 2003, to fight school dropout rates and give poor kids access to music education. Donda retired from teaching in 2004 to manage his career.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

For his second album Kanye wanted to leave chipmunk soul behind, partly because everyone was now copying it. He had loved Jon Brion's score for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and his work with Fiona Apple, so he brought Brion in, even though Brion had never made a hip hop record. They spent around two million dollars, with a twenty piece orchestra, harpsichord, celesta and Chinese bells. Late Registration came out on the thirtieth of August 2005 and debuted at number one, selling 860,000 copies in a week. Its big single, Gold Digger, built on a Ray Charles sample and sung with Jamie Foxx, went to number one. The song had originally been meant for the rapper Shawnna.[1] [2] [3]

Days after that release, Kanye stepped into American political history. On the second of September 2005 NBC broadcast a live telethon for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which had devastated Black neighbourhoods of New Orleans. Kanye was paired with the comedian Mike Myers to read from a script. Instead, he spoke about how the media portrayed Black survivors as looters and white survivors as people looking for food. Then, as Myers carried on reading, Kanye said that George Bush does not care about Black people. Chris Tucker, waiting to speak next, looked stunned, and the broadcast cut away. Five years later Kanye apologised, saying he had no grounds to call the president a racist.[1] [2] [3]

Awards shows became a flashpoint. At the MTV Europe Music Awards in November 2006, when his video for Touch the Sky lost to Justice and Simian, Kanye walked onto the stage and argued that he should have won. News outlets around the world criticised him. Days later he apologised from the stage in Brisbane, where he was opening for U2 on their Vertigo tour. That tour mattered in another way. Watching Bono hold whole stadiums every night, Kanye decided his next record needed big, simple songs that could fill arenas. He also toured with the Rolling Stones and found his most complicated rhymes did not reach the back rows.[1] [2]

Graduation, grief and 808s

Graduation swapped soul samples for synthesizers, house music from his Chicago youth, and a love of bands like Coldplay, the Killers and Keane. Its lead single, Stronger, was built on Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Kanye went through more than fifty versions of it, with eight engineers and eleven mix engineers. The cover was a cartoon by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Then the label set the release date for the eleventh of September 2007, the same day as 50 Cent's album Curtis, and the press turned it into a sales battle. 50 Cent even said he would stop making solo records if Kanye outsold him, before backing away from the promise.[1] [2]

Kanye won easily. Graduation sold 957,000 copies in its first week against 691,000 for Curtis, and Stronger became his third number one single. Critics have since called that week a turning point. The street hardened gangster persona that had ruled rap since the late nineties lost its grip, and a wave of more emotional, more experimental rappers followed, including Kid Cudi, Drake and J. Cole. Graduation won the Grammy for Best Rap Album and became his third album in a row nominated for Album of the Year, making him the first solo artist whose first three albums were all up for the top prize. It has since been certified eight times platinum in the United States.[1] [2]

Two months later came the loss that changed him. On the tenth of November 2007 Donda West died in Los Angeles at fifty eight, a day after cosmetic surgery that included a tummy tuck and a breast reduction. The coroner found she died of heart disease together with several complications from the surgery. The surgeon, Jan Adams, had convictions for alcohol related offences and past malpractice settlements, and an investigation followed. In 2009 California passed the Donda West Law, requiring a medical clearance before elective cosmetic surgery. Days after the funeral Kanye opened his Glow in the Dark tour in London and dedicated Hey Mama to her, along with a cover of Journey's Don't Stop Believin'. He did the same every night.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 2008 his engagement to the designer Alexis Phifer also ended. Out of that loneliness came 808s and Heartbreak, recorded in about three weeks in Honolulu and Burbank. Kanye barely rapped. He sang, through Auto-Tune, over cold drum machines and minor chords. The title came from the Roland TR-808 drum machine, and he only learned afterwards that 808 was also Hawaii's area code. He had called a young Cleveland rapper, Kid Cudi, after hearing his mixtape, and flown him to Hawaii, where Cudi co-wrote four songs. Released on the twenty fourth of November 2008, the album bewildered some fans but went to number one. Today it is credited with shaping emo rap and a whole generation of moody R&B.[1] [2] [3]

The villain year and a dark fantasy

On the thirteenth of September 2009 at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York, nineteen year old Taylor Swift won Best Female Video. As she began her speech, Kanye climbed onto the stage, took her microphone, and declared that Beyonce had made one of the best videos of all time. The crowd booed, and Swift left the stage visibly shaken. Later that night Beyonce invited her back to finish. The backlash was enormous. President Barack Obama was caught in an off air remark calling Kanye a jackass. Kanye apologised on his blog and on Jay Leno's show, and his planned tour with Lady Gaga was cancelled. He later blamed the moment on sincerity and alcohol.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kanye stepped away. In late 2009 he moved to Rome to intern at the fashion house Fendi, alongside his friend Virgil Abloh, the future Louis Vuitton designer. Then he retreated to Hawaii, booked all three rooms of the Avex studio in Honolulu around the clock, and flew in friends and heroes to work with him, from Jay-Z, Kid Cudi and Pusha T to Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. Engineers were on shift day and night while he slept in short bursts. Def Jam reportedly spent about three million dollars on the sessions. He said five thousand hours of work went into a single song, Power. From August 2010 he gave away a free new track every Friday.[1] [2] [3] [4]

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out on the twenty second of November 2010. It was huge and lavish where 808s had been bare, with choirs, prog rock samples and guest after guest, and it wrestled openly with fame, excess and his own ego. Its cover was a surreal painting by the artist George Condo. Alongside it came Runaway, a thirty five minute film that Kanye wrote, directed and starred in, about a man who falls for a phoenix. Critics called it his comeback and his masterpiece, and Pitchfork and Rolling Stone later named it one of the best albums of the decade. It won Best Rap Album, but many saw its absence from the Album of the Year shortlist as a snub.[1] [2] [3]

Next came Watch the Throne, a full album with Jay-Z that grew out of a plan for a five song EP. They recorded in hotel rooms in Paris, New York, Sydney and Abu Dhabi, argued about the direction, and scrapped two versions before settling on a third. Released on the eighth of August 2011, first as a download only, it became one of the few big albums of the era not to leak. It went to number one and spun off a hit that reached number five. The joint tour that followed became the highest grossing hip hop tour ever at the time. In 2012 Kanye also released Cruel Summer, a GOOD Music compilation, with a short film shown at Cannes in a custom pyramid.[1] [2]

Kim, Yeezus and The Life of Pablo

In April 2012 Kanye began dating Kim Kardashian, the reality television star he had known as a friend for years. Their daughter North was born in June 2013. Kanye proposed that October, on Kim's thirty third birthday, and they married on the twenty fourth of May 2014 at Forte di Belvedere in Florence, Italy. The New York Times called their marriage a historic blizzard of celebrity. They had four children in all, North, Saint, born in December 2015, and Chicago and Psalm, born through surrogates in 2018 and 2019. For most of the next decade, Kanye's music and his family life played out side by side on the covers of magazines and on the family's television show.[1] [2] [3]

Yeezus was recorded mostly in the living room of a Paris hotel loft, which Kanye listed in the credits as the No Name Hotel. Neighbours complained about beats pounding through the night. He was obsessed with minimalist design, visiting a furniture show at the Louvre five times, and he called one Le Corbusier lamp his greatest inspiration. The working title was Thank God for Drugs. Fifteen days before the deadline he called in Rick Rubin to strip the tracks back even further. Released on the eighteenth of June 2013 with no singles and no real cover, it was harsh, industrial and furious. It was his sixth number one, but it had his lowest first week sales as a solo artist.[1] [2]

Fashion was never a hobby for Kanye. In 2009 he had become the first non athlete to get his own Nike shoe, the Air Yeezy. In December 2013 he moved to Adidas, and the Yeezy Boost line launched in 2015. Within a few years Forbes was calling Yeezy one of the great retail stories of the century, with sales near 1.7 billion dollars a year. Controversy kept pace. In 2014 he was convicted of misdemeanour battery after scuffling with a photographer at Los Angeles airport, and given probation and anger management classes. In 2015 he headlined Glastonbury despite a petition against him, and at the MTV awards he accepted a career honour from Taylor Swift and announced he would run for president in 2020.[1] [2] [3]

His seventh album changed names several times, from So Help Me God to Swish to Waves, before he settled on The Life of Pablo, a reference to Pablo Picasso, Pablo Escobar and Paul the Apostle. On the eleventh of February 2016 he premiered it at Madison Square Garden during his Yeezy Season 3 fashion show. Three days later it appeared only on Tidal, the streaming service he partly owned with Jay-Z and others. Even after release he kept changing mixes and lyrics, calling it a living, breathing work. When it finally reached other services, it became the first album to top the Billboard 200 mainly through streaming. It was messy, gospel tinged and brilliant in places, and it contained a song called Famous.[1] [2]

Breakdown, Trump and the Wyoming sessions

The Saint Pablo tour started in August 2016 with a stage that floated above the crowd, hung from the ceiling on tracks and pulleys. On the third of October Kim was robbed at gunpoint in Paris. Kanye cut short his show in New York when he heard. The shows grew stranger. In San Jose on the seventeenth of November he told the crowd he would have voted for Donald Trump, and fans booed. Two nights later in Sacramento he played three songs, launched into a rant about Jay-Z, Beyonce, Hillary Clinton and radio, and walked off. On the twenty first of November the remaining twenty one dates were cancelled.[1] [2]

That same day Kanye was taken to the UCLA Medical Center on a psychiatric hold. His doctor had called emergency services, describing temporary psychosis brought on by sleep deprivation and dehydration. He was admitted under the name Jim Jones, and people close to him said he felt under spiritual attack. He stayed for more than a week and was released on the thirtieth of November. He later said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2016, and that he had become addicted to opioids prescribed after liposuction. Weeks after leaving hospital, he met President elect Donald Trump. Then he disappeared from Twitter and from public life for almost a year.[1] [2] [3]

In the spring of 2018 he came back loudly, posting philosophy on Twitter and praising Trump. At the start of May, in the newsroom of the celebrity website TMZ, he said that four hundred years of slavery sounded like a choice. A TMZ staffer, Van Lathan, confronted him on camera, telling him he was hurting people, and the backlash from Black artists and activists was fierce. Kanye later said he had meant mental enslavement, and apologised on New York radio that summer. He also scrapped the album he had been making and started again. In October he went to the White House to have lunch with Trump, just as Taylor Swift was publicly backing Democratic candidates.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new music came out of a ranch near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Over five weeks in the summer of 2018 Kanye released five seven song albums he had produced there. First came Pusha T's Daytona, whose cover was a photo of Whitney Houston's drug strewn bathroom that Kanye paid 85,000 dollars to use. Then his own album, Ye, on which he talked openly about his bipolar disorder and his suicidal thoughts. The week after, on his forty first birthday, came Kids See Ghosts, his joint album with Kid Cudi, with a cover by Takashi Murakami. Albums by Nas and Teyana Taylor followed. Kids See Ghosts was widely praised as the best of the batch.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His next album, Yandhi, was announced and postponed again and again, then abandoned. Instead, on the sixth of January 2019, Kanye began holding Sunday Service, a weekly gathering where a gospel choir sang reworked versions of his songs and others'. He pulled out of headlining Coachella that year because organisers would not build him a giant dome, then returned on Easter Sunday to perform with Sunday Service instead. He told his team to avoid sex before marriage while they worked. Jesus Is King came out on the twenty fifth of October 2019 and topped five Billboard charts at once, including the Christian and gospel charts, and won a Grammy. That same year he gave ten million dollars to the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Candidate, divorce and Donda

On the fourth of July 2020 Kanye announced on Twitter that he was running for president, as an independent for what he called the Birthday Party. At his only real rally, in Charleston, South Carolina, he appeared with 2020 shaved into his hair, spoke without a microphone, and wept while talking about abortion, saying his own father had wanted him aborted. He made the ballot in only twelve states and won around 66,000 votes. In between, he gave two million dollars to the families of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, including a college fund for Floyd's daughter. He also sent a stream of tweets saying the Kardashian family wanted to lock him up.[1] [2] [3]

In February 2021 Kim Kardashian filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences, and the two agreed on joint custody. Kanye poured the grief into Donda, named after his mother. He held huge listening parties at stadiums, and for weeks he lived in a locker room at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, which he turned into a studio, finishing the album with the producer Mike Dean. Donda finally came out on the twenty ninth of August 2021. Kanye claimed Universal had released it without his approval. The appearances of DaBaby and Marilyn Manson, both facing serious controversies at the time, drew heavy criticism. That October a judge approved his request to change his name legally to Ye.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The feud with Drake that had simmered for years was set aside in November 2021, when the two men were photographed together outside Drake's house. On the ninth of December they shared a stage at the Los Angeles Coliseum for a benefit concert calling for the release of the jailed Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover, in front of seventy thousand people. But 2022 turned dark. Kanye publicly attacked Kim's new boyfriend, the comedian Pete Davidson, in posts many described as harassment, and the Grammys dropped him as a performer. He briefly dated the actress Julia Fox. Netflix released Jeen-Yuhs, a documentary made from twenty years of footage by his old friend Coodie. The divorce was finalised in November 2022.[1] [2] [3]

In October 2022, at Paris Fashion Week, Kanye wore a T-shirt reading White Lives Matter, a slogan the Anti-Defamation League calls hate speech. Days later he posted that he was going to go death con three on Jewish people. Instagram and Twitter locked his accounts. Brands began to walk away. Vogue, Balenciaga, the talent agency CAA and his record label Universal cut ties, and on the twenty fifth of October Adidas ended the Yeezy deal immediately, saying his comments were hateful and dangerous. Gap pulled his products. Forbes estimated that his fortune fell from about two billion dollars to about four hundred million. Even his private Christian school, Donda Academy, closed abruptly for a few hours.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

It got worse. In November 2022 Kanye dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, bringing along the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and afterwards announced a new run for president. On the first of December, on the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones's show, he praised Hitler, veered into Holocaust denial, and called himself a Nazi. Soon after he posted a swastika merged with a Star of David, and his Twitter account was suspended. A deal to buy the social network Parler fell through. Rolling Stone reported that former collaborators said his fascination with Hitler went back almost twenty years, to the making of his first album. Kanye did not respond to that report.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Vultures, Heil Hitler and an apology

In January 2023 news broke that Kanye had married Bianca Censori, an Australian architect who worked at Yeezy, in a private ceremony the month before. In December 2023 he apologised to the Jewish community in a post written in Hebrew. By then he was making Vultures with the singer Ty Dolla Sign, as a duo whose name was written with the yen and dollar symbols. They recorded in Italy and Saudi Arabia and struggled to find a distributor. Released independently on the tenth of February 2024, Vultures 1 went straight to number one. Its single Carnival topped the Hot 100, making Kanye the only rap act with number ones in three different decades. Vultures 2 followed that August, widely judged unfinished.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The legal troubles were mounting. In 2024 a former assistant, Lauren Pisciotta, sued him for sexual harassment and wrongful termination, later adding allegations of sexual assault, which he denied. A former model sued him that November, alleging assault on a video set. Then early 2025 brought his worst outbursts yet. After the Grammys, where Censori appeared almost naked beside him, he posted on X that he was a Nazi and loved Hitler, and put a swastika T-shirt on sale. Shopify shut his store, his talent agency dropped him, and a Jewish former employee sued, alleging antisemitic messages. He later said he had been in a manic episode that lasted four months.[1] [2] [3]

On the eighth of May 2025, the eightieth anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, Kanye released a song called Heil Hitler, ending with a fragment of a Hitler speech. The major streaming services refused to carry it, and it was banned in Germany. Within weeks he said he was done with antisemitism and put out a rewritten version called Hallelujah. It was too late for Australia, where his wife's family lives. In July 2025 the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said the government had cancelled his visa after the song came out, adding that the country had enough problems without importing bigotry. The planned album around the song, first called WW3 and then Cuck, was eventually shelved.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty sixth of January 2026 Kanye took out a full page advert in the Wall Street Journal titled To Those I've Hurt. He wrote that he was not a Nazi or an antisemite and that he loved Jewish people. He blamed his behaviour on bipolar type one disorder, which he linked to an injury to the right frontal lobe of his brain from the 2002 car crash that he said went undiagnosed until 2023. He described a four month manic episode in early 2025 that nearly destroyed his life, and credited his wife with pushing him to get help. He also apologised to the Black community. Critics noted the timing, just before a new album. He insisted it was not about sales.[1] [2]

That album was Bully, announced at a concert in Haikou, China, in September 2024. A rough version appeared in March 2025 with a short film starring his son Saint fighting Japanese wrestlers with a toy mallet, and Kanye admitted half the vocals were made with artificial intelligence. He re-recorded most of them, signed with the independent company Gamma, and Bully was released on the twenty eighth of March 2026. On the first and third of April he played two sold out nights at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. On the second night Lauryn Hill joined him for All Falls Down, the song that had sampled her twenty two years earlier, and Travis Scott and North West came out too.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comeback hit a wall in London. At the end of March 2026 Wireless festival announced Kanye as its headliner for all three nights. Jewish groups, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and London's mayor Sadiq Khan condemned the booking, and sponsors including Pepsi and Diageo pulled out. The festival's boss, Melvin Benn, pleaded for forgiveness and second chances, and Kanye offered to meet Britain's Jewish community. On the seventh of April the government blocked him from entering the country, saying his presence would not be conducive to the public good, and Wireless was cancelled. As of 2026 he is still touring elsewhere, but his return to the mainstream remains fiercely contested.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The legacy

Strip away the headlines and the music is hard to argue with. Kanye has won twenty four Grammys from seventy five nominations, sold around 160 million records, and scored eleven number one albums in the United States. Rolling Stone put six of his albums on its list of the five hundred greatest of all time, from The College Dropout through Yeezus. He topped the Village Voice critics' poll four times, tying Bob Dylan. Time magazine twice named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. And he did it while changing his sound almost every time, from sped up soul to orchestras, stadium synths, Auto-Tune heartbreak, industrial noise and gospel.[1]

His influence runs through modern hip hop. His first three albums proved a rapper did not need a gangster story to sell millions, and the Graduation versus Curtis week is still seen as the moment the tide turned. 808s and Heartbreak gave rappers permission to sing about sadness, and artists from Drake to Travis Scott, Kid Cudi and Chance the Rapper have called him a direct influence. Travis Scott began as a producer signed to GOOD Music. Kendrick Lamar opened for him on the Yeezus tour. In fashion, the Yeezy line helped turn sneakers into luxury objects, and friends like Virgil Abloh carried his ideas into the heart of the European fashion houses.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That legacy now sits beside a record of cruelty that many listeners cannot separate from the art. His praise of Hitler, his antisemitic attacks and his treatment of women and former colleagues have cost him business partners, fans and friends, and his apologies have come and gone. He himself has pointed to his mental illness and his brain injury, and has asked for patience. Some critics hear genius and pain in the same records. Others have stopped listening. What is certain is that in the space of twenty years, the college dropout with a backpack full of beats changed the sound of popular music, and then spent years testing how much his audience would forgive.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Kanye West

Kanye West and Donda West. His mother was his first teacher, his manager and his fiercest defender. A professor who had joined a civil rights sit in as a child, she raised him alone in Chicago, took him to China, and gave up her university career in 2004 to run his business. Her death after cosmetic surgery in 2007 reshaped his music, from 808s and Heartbreak to the album and the company he named after her.[1] [2] [3]

Kanye West and Jay-Z. Jay-Z gave Kanye his big break as a producer, rapped over his beats on The Blueprint, and later made Watch the Throne with him. The bond later frayed badly. In 2016 Kanye ranted about Jay-Z and Beyonce on stage, and in 2025 he insulted Jay-Z again online. In between, Jay-Z recorded a verse for Donda hours before a listening party.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Friends for years, they began dating in 2012, married in Florence in 2014 and had four children. They were one of the most photographed couples on earth. Kim filed for divorce in February 2021, citing irreconcilable differences. Kanye's public campaign to win her back, and his attacks on her boyfriend Pete Davidson, were widely seen as harassment. The divorce was finalised in November 2022.[1] [2] [3]

Kanye West and Taylor Swift. Their feud began when he grabbed her microphone at the 2009 VMAs. They made peace, dined together, and in 2015 she presented him with a career award, only for him to suggest MTV booked her for ratings. The song Famous and the leaked phone call reignited it in 2016, and Swift answered with her album Reputation. He kept mentioning her in songs into 2024.[1] [2]

Kanye West and Kid Cudi. Kanye heard Kid Cudi's mixtape, phoned him out of the blue and flew him to Hawaii to help write 808s and Heartbreak, then signed him to GOOD Music. Both men struggled with mental illness. They fell out in 2016, when Kanye said from the stage that he had birthed Cudi, then made up days later, and in 2018 released Kids See Ghosts together.[1] [2] [3]

Kanye West and Drake. Kanye directed Drake's first music video and produced for him, and they were once neighbours. It soured in 2018 over Pusha T's diss track, the Lift Yourself beat and Kanye's tweets about Travis Scott's Sicko Mode. They reunited in 2021 for the Free Larry Hoover concert, but the peace did not hold, with fresh jabs on both sides in the years since.[1]

Kanye West and No I.D.. The Chicago producer No I.D. was Kanye's mentor as a teenager, bringing him into sessions with Common and introducing him to the manager who signed him. Years later the roles reversed, and No I.D. became one of Kanye's collaborators, working on 808s and Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He also ran GOOD Music from 2008 to 2011, and recalled Kanye claiming the song Heartless for himself during sessions meant for Jay-Z.[1] [2] [3]

Kanye West and Virgil Abloh. They met at a Chicago print shop, interned together at Fendi in Rome in 2009, and Abloh became creative director of Kanye's company Donda. Abloh went on to found Off-White and lead menswear at Louis Vuitton. He died of a rare cancer in November 2021, aged forty one, and Kanye attended the tribute show in Miami days later.[1]

Kanye West and Bianca Censori. An Australian architect who worked at Yeezy, Censori married him in a private ceremony in December 2022. Her barely there outfits beside him at events, including the 2025 Grammys, drew worldwide criticism, and he wrote that he had dominion over his wife. In his 2026 apology he credited her with persuading him to seek help after his manic episode.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kanye West and Amber Rose. The model Amber Rose dated Kanye from 2008 to 2010, after starring in a Young Jeezy video he appeared on. After they split, he made a crude remark about needing thirty showers before dating Kim Kardashian. Rose answered that he had bullied and slut shamed her throughout their relationship, and she went on to found the Los Angeles SlutWalk.[1] [2]

Kanye West and Pusha T. The Virginia rapper was one of Kanye's closest allies, appearing on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and becoming president of GOOD Music in 2015. Kanye produced his album Daytona, whose closing diss sparked the Drake war. Pusha T left GOOD Music in 2022, as Kanye's world was falling apart.[1] [2] [3]

Kanye West and Ty Dolla Sign. The Los Angeles singer had sung on Kanye songs since Only One in 2014. When Kanye was shunned in 2023, Ty Dolla Sign stood with him, forming the duo behind the Vultures albums, and the record Carnival gave them both a number one. He said he always knew Kanye would come back.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Kanye West

• His mother Donda joined a 1958 sit in at an Oklahoma City drug store lunch counter at the age of nine. Donda West and her father, the civil rights activist Portwood Williams, took part in the Katz Drug Store sit in in August 1958. She later spent twenty seven years teaching at Chicago State University.[1]
• As a ten year old, Kanye lived in Nanjing, China, and was the only foreigner in his class. His mother spent a year teaching at Nanjing University as a Fulbright scholar. She said he settled in well and picked up the language quickly, though he later forgot most of it.[1] [2]
• His father Ray West was a former Black Panther and one of the first Black photojournalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Ray later became a Christian counsellor. In 2006 he opened a small cafe in Maryland, the Good Water Store, with startup money from his son.[1]
• Kanye's first production credits came at nineteen, on eight tracks for the Chicago rapper Grav. The album was Down to Earth, released in 1996. It was the start of years of making beats for local rappers before Roc-A-Fella came calling.[1]
• Up to forty percent of The College Dropout was recorded on a small Roland VS-1680 recorder. Kanye told GQ in 2020 that around thirty to forty percent of his debut album was made on the portable Roland multitrack, rather than in a big studio.[1]
• Aretha Franklin only let Kanye sample her on School Spirit if he censored the song. The song borrows from her Spirit in the Dark. His engineer said the song would have been much weaker without that sample, so Kanye agreed, and an uncensored version only surfaced online in 2011.[1]
• The mixtape version of Through the Wire ended with a sample of Elton John's I'm Still Standing. It was first called Through the Wire, Still Standing. When the Elton John sample was dropped for the official single, that part of the title went with it.[1]
• Kanye paid for the Through the Wire video himself, inspired by an Adidas advert. The video went on to win Video of the Year at the 2004 Source Hip Hop Awards.[1]
• Gold Digger was originally written for the Chicago rapper Shawnna. The song was meant for her debut album before Kanye took it back. It became one of his biggest hits, yet he later admitted he did not like it and made it for the money.[1]
• Kanye recruited Jon Brion for Late Registration after hearing his score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Brion had never made a hip hop record. The pair clicked after a single afternoon, when they found neither of them limited themselves to one genre.[1] [2]
• Chris Brown renamed his 2007 album because Kanye had already claimed the title Graduation. Brown had planned to call his second album Graduation. When he learned Kanye was using it, he switched to Exclusive.[1]
• Kanye made more than fifty versions of Stronger before he was happy with it. He worked with eight audio engineers and eleven mix engineers in Los Angeles and New York before settling on the final mix by Manny Marroquin.[1]
• The 808 in 808s and Heartbreak is a drum machine, not Hawaii's area code, though that is where he recorded it. The title referred to the Roland TR-808. Kanye said he only learned about Hawaii's 808 area code after naming the album, and took it as a sign.[1]
• On the Glow in the Dark tour, Kanye's stage show featured a spaceship called Jane. The concerts followed a space opera story in which he travelled in the ship to a desolate planet. The tour began in London just after his mother's death.[1]
• Kanye claimed five thousand hours of work went into the single Power. The song samples King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man and was his comeback single after the 2009 VMA scandal.[1]
• The model in the Runaway film refused Kanye's plan for her to be naked throughout. Selita Ebanks played the phoenix in the thirty five minute film, which Kanye directed, drawing on Purple Rain, Pink Floyd's The Wall and Michael Jackson's Thriller.[1]
• Yeezus was originally going to be called Thank God for Drugs. Kanye made it in a Paris hotel loft and said a single Le Corbusier lamp was his greatest inspiration. Neighbours complained about the noise.[1]
• In 2009 Kanye became the first non athlete to get his own Nike shoe deal. The shoe was the Air Yeezy. He later moved to Adidas, where Yeezy grew into a line bringing in around 1.7 billion dollars a year.[1] [2]
• Kanye and Virgil Abloh were interns in the same class at Fendi in Rome in 2009. Abloh later ran Kanye's creative company Donda, founded Off-White and became artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear.[1] [2]
• Kanye once owned the rights to open Fatburger restaurants around Chicago. His company bought the Chicago rights in 2008 and planned ten outlets. The first opened in Orland Park that year and closed in 2011 after poor sales.[1]
• When he was hospitalised in November 2016, Kanye was admitted under the name Jim Jones. His personal doctor made the emergency call, describing temporary psychosis from sleep deprivation and dehydration. He was released after more than a week.[1]
• Kanye paid 85,000 dollars for the Daytona cover, a photo of Whitney Houston's bathroom. The image of the late singer's cluttered bathroom was chosen for Pusha T's 2018 album and drew widespread criticism.[1] [2]
• Kanye's first cover idea for the album Ye was a photo of the surgeon who operated on his mother. He said he wanted to forgive and stop hating. The surgeon, Jan Adams, asked him to stop using his image but offered to meet.[1]
• Kids See Ghosts came out on Kanye's forty first birthday, the eighth of June 2018. The cover was painted by Takashi Murakami, based on Hokusai's prints of Mount Fuji. The album was the third of five released from the Wyoming sessions.[1]
• Kanye gave ten million dollars to help finish James Turrell's Roden Crater, an art observatory in a dormant volcano. Turrell had been working on the Arizona project since 1977. Kanye visited in December 2018 and called it life changing.[1] [2]
• Kanye has an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received it in 2015. He has said he was frustrated that he never got to study fashion at Central Saint Martins in London.[1] [2]
• Students at Donda Academy wore black uniforms designed by Kanye and made by Balenciaga. Parents and staff had to sign non disclosure agreements, and even the school's location was secret. It was officially listed as closed in 2024.[1]
• Donda 2 was never allowed on the charts, because it was released only on a special device. It was sold on the Stem Player, a gadget that let owners remix songs. Billboard ruled it ineligible, and it was heavily pirated.[1]
• Jeen-Yuhs was built from footage his friend Coodie had been filming since before Kanye was famous. Netflix paid around thirty million dollars for it. After it aired in 2022, The College Dropout re-entered the Billboard chart at number eleven.[1] [2]
• Carnival made Kanye the only rap act to top the Hot 100 in three different decades. It was his fifth number one, after Slow Jamz, Gold Digger, Stronger and his feature on Katy Perry's E.T. in 2011.[1] [2]
• The first cut of the Bully film showed his son Saint fighting New Japan Pro-Wrestling stars with a toy mallet. The black and white film was edited by Hype Williams. The early songs used AI versions of Kanye's voice, which he later replaced with his own.[1]
• As a presidential candidate in 2020, Kanye picked a Wyoming preacher as his running mate. She was Michelle Tidball. He ran for his own Birthday Party, explaining that when they won, it would be everybody's birthday.[1] [2]
• During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama said he had met Kanye and Jay-Z to talk about reaching young voters. Obama praised hip hop as smart and insightful but criticised its materialism. A year later he called Kanye a jackass over the VMA stunt.[1] [2]
• On Slow Jamz, the voice urging Kanye to go faster belongs to the comedian Aisha Tyler. Her line sets up Kanye's joke that he cannot rap that fast but knows someone who can, handing over to Twista.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.