On Dropout, West had checked his own ego with humor and pathos now he countered his god complex with chemicals and a death wish. Yeezus juxtaposed civil rights iconography with bad puns and degrading orgies and made it all sound like a Nine Inch Nails nightmare. He'd found rap's ceiling in the minds of the old gatekeepers, and with his sixth album he'd take what goodwill those gatekeepers had left for him and shove it. 'I'm assuming I have the most Grammys of anyone my age, but I haven't won one against a white person,' he told The New York Times that year. He'd mainstreamed Daft Punk and sad Auto-Tune rap, pissed off two presidents and at least one pop princess, and become the most acclaimed and controversial rapper of the century so far - and he was frustrated. trick Kanye had improved upon), there were scores of live strings and congas and choirs that blew way past the budget.īy 2013, that nerdy Chicago beat-maker, now 36, had amassed 21 Grammys and five multi-platinum solo albums (plus another with Jay-Z), the most recent of which critics had called a generational masterpiece.

And all of it sounded so good: Beyond the chipmunk soul sample work (a No I.D. In the era of 50 Cent and The Game, this was a middle-class Midwestern guy whose ambition so happened to be insane, who'd be dreaming one minute of walking out on his retail job and the next of bringing Jesus to the club as his plus-one. We knew the backstory, too: A nerdy beat-maker rises through the ranks of the premier NYC street-rap label, leaps atop boardroom tables to convince powers-that-be of his solo promise, shatters his jaw in a rented Lexus. The same month 'Slow Jamz' topped the charts, I downloaded The College Dropout on LimeWire, my pirating platform of choice the files were mislabeled 'KAYNE WEST.' People who once worshipped Kanye have relitigated their relationship with the rapper in recent years, but it's hard to overstate how it felt back then, listening to a Chicago rap album we all knew was an all-timer.

1, and there's justice in that milestone going to Twista, the unsung hometown hero, even if the song was pure Kanye. 'Slow Jamz' marked the first time a Chicago rapper had scored a Billboard No. I knew Twista, the Guinness-certified fastest rapper alive, from the radio, where they'd sometimes play his song 'Po Pimp' with the West Side group Do or Die that was about as big as it got where local rap was concerned. (New to me, at least.) 'Slow Jamz' was goofy but sort of genius - the helium Luther Vandross sample, the 'state of R&B' meta-commentary, the lines that made you cackle at their knuckleheaded audacity. The year I was old enough to drive on Lake Shore, the biggest song in my high school - and for one week, the entire country - was 'Slow Jamz' by Twista, which featured Jamie Foxx and a new guy, Kanye West. He had it in spades thanks to No I.D., a fellow South Sider whose lived-in beats would be the keystone of a new Chicago sound. Common's artistic identity was defined against the gangster mainstream - an intellectual in a newsie cap, pining for the days when rap had soul.

When a 19-year old rapper named Common Sense appeared in The Source's 'Unsigned Hype' column circa '91, it was with a backhanded compliment: 'Impressive rhyme skills especially for an MC coming out of Chicago,' as if it were a shock they sold microphones there. But in the '90s, while the genre became a juggernaut on the coasts and down South, Chicago was an afterthought. That the third largest American city, which urbanized the blues and invented house, was considered a backwater for the first 25 years of hip-hop's history is hard to fathom now. But that suits the place: 'For always our villains have hearts of gold,' wrote Algren, 'and all our heroes are slightly tainted.' Almost as a rule, that greatness has been complicated: by a chip on the shoulder, a misunderstanding, sometimes by the city itself. But I've always thought it also applied to the city's most emblematic rappers, especially so in the past two decades, as a few iconoclasts - chroniclers and products of corruption - transcended the Midwest's status as hip-hop flyover territory and elbowed their way into greatness. That was in 1951, the prime of the Maxwell Street blues. Ī city for poets, brawlers and hustlers - that's how the writer Nelson Algren described his chosen hometown in his book Chicago: City on the Make. As it celebrates its 50th birthday, we are mapping hip-hop's story on a local level, with more than a dozen city-specific histories of the music and culture.

Chicago gaslight club