Translating Kanye

Kanye West, Coodie Simmons, and ‘Jeen-Yuhs’

The static gives way to Kanye West in a flak vest freestyling; Ye managing his presidential campaign; Ye considering a tweet. “Don’t tweet that?” he asks, showing it to Coodie Simmons, the filmmaker behind Jeen-Yuhs, a revelatory new docuseries on Netflix. Coodie says he should.

“We need that translation,” Ye says. “I be needing a translator real bad.”

Coodie agrees—“Mm-hmm”—and then cuts to the credits. 

It is understandable that Ye, who has shaken the faith of even his most ardent followers—be it by going on a Sunday worship tour or making a lackluster run for the White House or bickering with his ex-wife on social media—would desire a translator. It’s also a task that Coodie and his co-director, Chike Ozah, embrace in this three-part documentary that charts Kanye’s early years as a producer in Chicago and New York, the arduous creation of his award-winning debut, and his past few years struggling with mental health while launching his global fashion brand and making some of the most compelling music of his career.

Coodie translates Kanye on multiple levels: first by moving him from one medium to another, from Kanye’s music to this docuseries. Kanye’s voice—his bombast and insecurities—is familiar, if not too much so. It can become tiring, the Kanye noise. But here we have footage, in the first episode, of a young Kanye stalking the offices of record labels, desperately trying to get anyone to listen to his music. He is ignored, or politely tolerated, but never celebrated for work he feels is nothing less than world-historically significant. This footage of Kanye’s dedication and debasement and grit—wandering halls, working without doubts or breaks—gives us, in a documentary tightly structured around the artist’s rise and fall, our underdog hero. Kanye is reintroduced to us as someone we feel good rooting for.

But the essence of what gets translated in this docuseries is something else altogether. The translator’s true task, Walter Benjamin writes in “The Task of the Translator,” is not to change something from one language or medium to another but to capture “what it contains in addition to information”—to capture “the unfathomable, the mysterious, the poetic.” For these qualities of the original to be translated, Benjamin argues, they must be possessed in equal measure by the translator. So it is in this new docuseries, a Kanye West biopic concurrently about Coodie Simmons. While translating Ye, Coodie narrates his own life and rhapsodizes about faith and his late father and parenthood and art and missed chances. As a narrator and thinker, Coodie is kind and wise and rueful—all traits that distinguish him from the docuseries’ ostensible subject and give the series an energy that makes it something genuinely joyful and mysterious, Kanye’s barbed genius getting translated into Coodie’s beatific jeen-yuhs.  

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Early in the first episode, running through footage of Kanye from 1995, the frame freezes on a nice-looking guy in a gray suit. “Now I bet you’re all wondering who the hell I am?” Coodie says in voice-over.   

When he first meets Kanye, Coodie is the host of Channel Zero, a public access television show he created in the 1990s to cover Chicago’s hip-hop scene. Channel Zero is itself an artifact of interest, capturing a passing DIY moment in television’s history as well as the last years of hip-hop’s youth, shortly before the genre matured into the most popular musical form on the planet. It is while covering a party for Channel Zero that Coodie puts the camera on an up-and-coming producer donning bogus spectacles and a trim goatee. He introduces Kanye West, and so begins a 35-year friendship.

This encounter between Coodie and Kanye also inaugurates the single most interesting archive of materials dedicated to an artist of Kanye’s significance since Eckermann published his correspondence with Goethe, for Coodie not only befriended Kanye but eventually decided to follow the aspiring rapper to New York and film his rise to hip-hop stardom, hoping to make a film in the fashion of Hoop Dreams. The series’ first episode, culled from hundreds of hours of fascinating footage (Coodie was always around, it seems, and never stopped shooting), tells us the story of a hardworking perfectionist; a doting son; a man willing to put up with any indignity in the interest of achieving his dreams, which by episode’s end he appears to have done. Part I of the documentary series concludes with Kanye being anointed by Jay-Z, who drapes a large gold chain around Kanye’s neck and introduces him as the newest member of Roc-A-Fella Records, then the most important rap label in the world. 

But the second episode opens with Kanye working harder still. Rappers at Roc-A-Fella think of him as someone who makes beats—a producer and not an MC—and are not really interested in hearing his songs. Then one night, on the way home from the studio, Kanye gets in a car crash that nearly kills him, and his debut release with Roc-A-Fella is indefinitely postponed. The episode documents Kanye’s difficult road to recovery, which includes multiple surgeries on his jaw and having his mouth wired shut for a month, during which time he records “Through the Wire,” a breakout single that was nominated for a Grammy.

How did Kanye keep going, one wonders again and again—how did he keep up his faith? And also, what the fuck is Coodie still doing there! And how is he financially supporting himself? And who is paying for this project? Kanye trusts his own genius—this we all know—and we watch these early years with an awareness that, despite the slights and hardships, he’ll end up vindicated. But as the film progresses, a more interesting subject emerges, which is Coodie’s quiet faith in this work—in Kanye’s genius as well as his own.

He is a guy, he rightly points out, who most of us have never heard of. Watching the decades-old footage, we know one man’s work will be rewarded and the other’s unseen and unfinished for 30 years. Jeen-Yuhs, then, is a docuseries about success as much as failure, which runs like a leitmotif beneath the grandeur of Kanye’s more dominant tune.  

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Coodie and Kanye fall out of touch—or, more accurately put, Kanye gets famous and stops talking to Coodie—and so the filmmaker is not witness to some of the controversies that have come to define Kanye West: interrupting Taylor Swift’s Grammy speech; saying that “slavery was a choice”; embracing and then disavowing Trump.

In the same period, Coodie has a daughter; his father, a deep influence on him, passes away. He grows into a content and grateful person, and his life looks full: a happy family, a serious and sustaining commitment to his art, a deep faith in God, a filmmaking career that is solid if not luminous. 

Then, in 2014, Kanye and Coodie reconnected. “It made me a little nervous,” the filmmaker admits. “I knew Kanye, but I’d never met Yeezy.” Coodie spends the final portion of the film trying to understand his old friend, to be there for him during a painful period, and to translate Kanye’s illness—Ye has spoken about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder—rendering it palpable and painful. In some moments, when Ye seems especially unsettled and unwell, Coodie cuts away, creating gaps and silences that amount to astonishing acts of cinema and goodness. 

But the translator is not the author, and while translators can be appreciated, they are rarely celebrated. Sometimes their work is not even recognized: Shortly before the film’s release, Kanye tweeted that Drake should narrate the film instead of Coodie, not realizing what Coodie has done—that he has harmonized Kanye’s genius with his own and given one of the most dissonant and dynamic artists of our time some resolution.