Netflix’s jeen-yuhs gave fans a proper look at Kanye West’s early years, but some “turning points” in his career didn’t quite make the cut, according to Consequence.
The longtime Ye collaborator caught up with AllHipHop to discuss his upcoming LP, Nice Doing Business With You, and his thoughts on the Coodie & Chike documentary. Reiterating a comment he made at the documentary’s SOBs screening in New York, Consequence explained that he felt the doc missed out on covering Ye’s mixtape days.
“There’s always gonna be a narrative arc, where there’s a start, a beginning, a climax to build a story because television works on that, from that aspect,” he said. “But I think there were certain turning points that I would have loved to see just a tad bit of. Obviously, when you see episode 1, you see also when Kanye’s playing ‘All Falls Down’ for Chaka Pilgrim and it seems as though there’s no real feedback. You can’t go from that to all the sudden, ‘Tada, I’m on MTV now.’ That’s a process, and a big part of that was the mixtapes that we began to do.”
As Cons explained, he “initiated” Ye’s early tapes due to the fact that New York was seeing success in mixtapes from Dipset, G-Unit, and more.
“It was a currency within itself,” Cons said, comparing early tapes to Bitcoin. “The value that it gave you if you was hungry would exponentially increase any record deal you were gonna get anyway. When he’s playing ‘All Falls Down,’ he’s already at the label as a platinum producer, he did ‘H to the Izzo.’ What you gotta understand, especially in New York, it’s the top and the bottom. So yeah, you could have the swag straight, but if your bars ain’t straight, n---as ain’t respecting you.”
Cons then called mixtapes a “pivotal part of turning a no to a yes,” and said that the only way they were able to prove that Ye was a rapper—and not just a producer—was “though the mixtapes” they made, like Get Well Soon and Freshman Adjustment.
“That’s such a key notation that’s not included in that story that, for me, especially for any hip-hop purist, you wanna know the blueprint. At the end of the day, us as Black people, our history is already fragmented to begin with.”
