What Kanye West Studio Sessions Are Really Like | Deep Dive

kanye west is well known for a lot of things he's one of the most successful artists of all time a musical innovator a top tier fashion designer owner of a billion dollar company and one of the most famous people in the world how much more successful do you want me to be more successful but maybe kanye's most admirable trait is his ability to bring the most talented people together into one room and create the highest level of product possible and there's no field he's shown that skill often more than music my greatest pain in life is i will never be able to see me before for most artists working with someone of kanye west's creative stature is a dream come true being able to watch yay work learn from him and contribute to some of the most well-received projects in musical history is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity even early on in his career though kanye was impressing legends like pharrell with impromptu studio performances i can't complain with the action it did to my left eye look where the accident didn't left eye first aliyah now romeo [Music] [Applause] or playing beats for jay-z that had him looking like a meme before memes even existed but as kanye grew in his own career his studio sessions evolved into an almost mythical process in this video we're going to look at what it's like to be in the studio with kanye west straight from the mouths of artists like nicki minaj pusha t rizza jamie foxx and more [Music] just because yay's process is unique that doesn't mean it's always easy to be in the studio with him i mean big sean recently said it was actually the opposite experience have you re do a verse 10 times redo a verse 10 times redo some drums 10 times chance the rapper might still be having flashbacks from this day and the thing about working with kanye is that even though it's a timeless experience your work may never actually see the light of day a lot of rappers have spoken about doing a bunch of songs with him only to never have them actually come out or maybe you recorded a verse that you really liked but it never makes a final cut of the album just as big draco far to what we are today yeah you know that's it's like take them off your album you ain't hear that verse no hold the [ __ ] up [ __ ] i know you ain't trying to hold up [ __ ] but kanye is a perfectionist when it comes to his art sean mentioned rewriting verses in that first clip we showed but that seems like the standard in a yay studio session rick ross said that kanye made him rewrite his classic verse for devil in a new dress multiple times but it ended up being unanimously crowned as one of ross's best verses of his career yay even made pusha t rewrite his runaway verse four times and that's pusha t kanye allegedly told king push that he needed him to be quote more douchebag on the record here's what he had to say about the song's creation push said i'm writing a verse and i come back to the table and it's something that i'm feeling and he's like nah but i need more douchebag and i'm like all right man come on so i go back and he's like nah more douche bag he's screaming at me more douche bag at this point thinking about kanye's screaming more douchebag at pusha t in itself is hilarious but back to what pusha was saying yay was relentless about making the final product just right he just pushes you and pushes you and pushes you with runaway i think i wrote that four times even nicki minaj admitted that kanye pushed her to write a better version of her now classic monster verse the verse that many call one of the most important of her career and one of the best of the 2010s all together what i remember most about monster is that kanye really pushed me to be better that you know i wrote a verse to it and he was like i think you could do better he's like murder me on this murder me no but he just was like i think you could do better and i think you should really think about what you want to say and i said wow i never thought about it like that and i just wrote down a whole bunch of stuff and then i created the rap from there um so that's what made me fall in love with kanye because he didn't have to do that you know he didn't have to push me to be my best but he did and kanye's creative direction isn't only limited to versus yay knows exactly what he wants every hook to sound like as an executive producer as nikki said he wants to bring the best out of everyone just listen to saha the prince talk about the recording of the now classic song all the lights saxophones [ __ ] vocals altop soprano antenna like they know all of the lights they don't know it's elton john alicia keys rihanna uh drake all them on there he asked them to sing their own verse or they own a party ask them because you seen a melody for a background like they sing we are the world about it everybody saying we all you ain't got them in there apparently alicia keys was even pregnant while recording those vocals one of the best kanye studio stories though comes from jamie foxx who is also one of the best storytellers and he learned firsthand not to question yay's melodic direction for a hook and then one day throwing his party and all of a sudden this dude walked in with a backpack jaw a little swollen mm-hmm kanye yeah uh i have a song uh i want you to get on that's like what i got the studio in the back so we go in the back and he said the song go she said she wants some marvin gaye some luther van gaal i said i got it i got it she say she wants some muffin he said what are you doing i said you don't know about all right i got to put the arm b [ __ ] on the city and this one we learned about this one we learned about kanye said uh don't do that but i'm jamie if i say yeah but don't do that he said just do the song like like this so i did a song in my mind i'm like this [ __ ] is whack he's not gonna make it right and then i left i did it i did i left i did a bad movie i came back and when i came back from that i said yeah remember the song he was fronting on it's number one in the country but all of this comes from kanye having a clear vision of what he wants from a song and all of the artists who are involved in that song john mayer described it perfectly when asked about working with kanye one of the first times i saw him in the studio he had a laptop in his arm and he went listen to this and it was the instrumental of gold digger and he wrapped along to it perfect it was perfect he i just heard him do stuff so so kanye's thing is that at least when i i don't want to pretend like i know him super well but i don't imagine this changes in somebody as a creative the the veil that hangs between what you know and what you don't in terms of creating for him is so frigging thin that i understand his excitement artistically because he can pull anything into existence that he wants he is the maybe the greatest summoner of of of creative energy so i've seen him do it it's a magic trick you know who's really good at it too his chance chance is really good at it and shawn's really good at it too but kanye's the best at it in terms of sitting in a room with a thing he doesn't have and going and coming back with a thing within seconds he's fearless plus that session delivered us some classic moments like this first the white guy and the black guy must meet and to do that a fumbling must occur between the sequence of events and the handshake to the hug watch what just happened about 15 minutes ago hey oh hey man what's going on let's start with the pounds come on that's good yeah but even though he's a visionary when it comes to creative direction he's also willing to go to experts in their given fields and let them do their thing a perfect example is when you tap timberland just to make the drums knock a little bit harder better and faster on stronger i'm sorry that was a really bad pun but please don't turn off the video i promise no more bad jokes for the remainder the drums ain't right i still think i want to get the drums right and get the [ __ ] knocking you know for the deficit i can beat up right now and you're going to go crazy because i can do a lot everyday i don't i had so many sounds like it's it's too much to go through it hurts [Music] here he is talking about the creation of commons b album and how much he learned from being around common in the studio i'm gonna tell you shouldn't did this you should've did that so it wasn't just okay us going in and making beats man like this album working on this album made my life better but yay studio sessions are eccentric in more ways than just how the music is created from start to finish kanye creates a whole aesthetic and feeling around each album that everyone involved is living here is chris rock talking about what he walked into during the my beautiful dark twisted fantasy recording sessions first of all i hope he doesn't you know you know kanye get mad at you then you get dissed on a record but no i was just impressed like first of all everybody in this studio had suits on everybody you're kidding me i'm serious was that like a pre-wreck yo i thought he had like flown in a bunch of guys from like europe or something but like all the all the engineers and everybody was in like black suits and white white shirts and black like he he set up a mood right yeah when you walked in there you felt this mood that same thing happens today just with different vibes during the donda sessions everyone had to wear donda vest and matching merch according to five year foreign you got studio rules when you in the studio yeah everybody gotta wear five-year-old merch okay fire respectable i learned that from yay i like that yeah he was with the a [ __ ] he made his own way like you had the vest on we got the best one he made us over at dawn the merch [ __ ] yeah we gonna don the time and i guess to get us yeah i mean don the timing bonded timing put you in the right he gave everybody yeezys it's fire everyone got a pair of yeezys he's certain pants no he this is what he do it's like a uniform he'd give us like yeezys some type of pants okay and then donda shirts that's what they do uniform universe uniform so i guess i get to take away to like the egos an artist and songwriter casey told us in an interview that there were even daily bible studies with a real pastor going on during the donda sessions now you got five you porn you got all these people we sent down having bible study and i felt like that was really like that was key you know and here's rizza talking about the focus and routine that kanye had that inspired the whole room to create during the my beautiful dark twisted fantasy time period and you know i spent like two weeks out in hawaii while he was working on his album and looking at his regimen i'm gonna share this with you maybe i'll maybe you know i don't know if i got the authority to because it's his life but i'm gonna share because this is a school academy where we share knowledge and somebody is we'll grab it and y'all multiply it i'm gonna tell you something this young man does y'all they get up every morning to eat breakfast together his whole crew they talk about yesterday and the next day and the day of and the present they plan oh noble breakfast they sit there and they talk about what they want to do what they did and how to make the music better then they go exercise together okay go to the ymca they play basketball lift weights focus get the energy out get the chi up and then they hit the studio around four o'clock firstly well first you do some charity work you know what i mean like invite all these kids and do some charity [ __ ] so therefore he's doing a good deed of the day as well good karma but then he goes to the studio and he stays there from four and when i was there we left it for so 12 hours of in the studio work then go to bed get up and do it again the next day according to diplo during the watch the throne sessions kanye even had mary kate and ashley olsen in there for this reason only also i'm bringing mary kate and ashley olsen over too because they're like my thermometer for like what white girls listen to i guess which is what's the strange part of the whole thing so american ashley olsen was there and i was sitting with this guy named don jazzy like a nigerian producer he was just twit twitter going on like trying to work on the beats but he was just doing tweet tweet stuff even though i really wasn't doing anything good i was kind of nervous mary kate ashley olsen was breathing down my neck kanye kept showing up at one point it came with kim kardashian in there and this is when she was still married to the guy that looked like blake griffin forgot his name tagama and um and she was really pretty actually i thought that's kanye's such a cool guy and yes apparently this is a real story i wonder what their first reaction was to hearing the line in the song [Music] but that's not even the most kanye thing that he did during that session apparently yay walked in and told the whole room this now keep in mind this was 2010 or 2011 at the latest he like opens the door i'm packing my bags up trying to get out of there as fast as i can so i just i failed at this whole session and he says um guys i'm gonna marry kim kardashian i'm gonna be president one day i'm gonna be a fashion designer the master manifester today kanye is renting out entire stadiums for the recording of his albums and switching up the order and the verses in real time in front of the world but it seems like the motivation to create something that will impact people on a new level and elevate his artistic style is still the same for hip-hop dx i'm jeremy hegt make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos like this daily news artist interviews let us know who we should cover next in the comments and let us know in the comments what's the one kanye studio session you would have liked to have been in the room for to witness we'll leave you with one of the most inspirational speeches of all time at least in my opinion peace i know every i know everybody asked me the question they wanted to know what kind i know he's going well out and he's going to do something crazy everybody want to know what i would do if i didn't win i guess we'll never know [Applause] [Music]

Channel: HipHopDX

Views: 1,040,534

Keywords: kanye, kanye west, ye, kanye west studio, kanye west studio sessions, kanye west studio session, kanye west in the studio, kanye west recording, kanye my beautiful dark twisted fantasy, kanye west recording runaway, kanye west the making of, nicki minaj, rick ross, pusha t, rza, chris rock kanye west, hip hop, rap, hiphopdx, kanye west documentary, kanye west jeen yuhs, kanye west mini documentary

Id: UddZjRJFOqQ

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 23 2022