What looks to be a rare Kanye West beat tape from 1997 has apparently surfaced online Monday morning. The beat tape includes eight instrumentals and was uploaded to SoundCloud by an unknown user that goes by the name Trilly Madison. As of now, it's currently unclear how the songs ended up online, but the first track does include a very old Kanye producer tag from way back in the day.
Of course, everyone already knows that Kanye started off in rap as a producer, which makes it not that surprising that he had a beat tape like this floating around. Naturally, with anything that takes place with Kanye on the Internet, the forum site KanyeToThe has already discovered the origins of a few of the songs, and where the beats were used. As the site pointed out, two of the beats were used on songs for the artists Infamous Syndicate and Grav, respectively.
To no surprise, the production is sample heavy, though not soulful, with the majority of the beats having more of a laid back feel. With the production now online, there's a pretty good chance that rappers will jump at the opportunity to rap over some very rare Kanye beats he probably assumed would never see the light of day. In a way, this is a blessing though, as it shows fans just how far he's come as not only a producer, but also as an artist altogether. We've reached out to reps for Kanye for comment on this and will update as more details come out. You can stream the beat tape below.
