Kanye West is an artist who’s always seen wearing different hats (metaphorical, but sometimes literal). In addition to being a designer, does the rapper also produce his own music?
While Kanye doesn’t produce outside of his genre, he’s an award-winning producer in his own right, producing beats on his albums and for others on his label and outside of it. He’s produced for some big names and worked with even more behind the scenes to create some of his biggest hits.
Read on to know more about how produces iconic hits for himself and involves himself from the first to the last stage of his albums!
Kanye West Has Won Awards For His Production
Having multiple awards to his name, Kanye West is no ordinary average music producer.
Producing is how Kanye got his start in the rap game. To date, Kanye has won over 15 awards for his work a producer alone, bagging Producer of The Year nods and wins in consecutive years, as recent as a Grammy in 2018.
This might not be a surprise to anyone who knows of Kanye’s history and just how much work he put into his craft. The man who once claimed that the work on his multiple award-winning Power was “literally 5,000 man-hours” might not have been exaggerating, given that Kanye has been producing beats since barely hitting teenage. West had a mentor in the legendary hip-hop producer No I.D. and worked on music as soon as he got home from school.
Kanye Is A Prolific Producer
While it might seem mind-boggling to even cognize how Kanye has time to sit down and actually make music between tweeting absolutely incendiary takes on everything under the sun, Kanye seems to be extremely focused on his work as a producer and his responsibilities with his label GOOD Music.
In the past two years alone, West has produced on 15 albums by different artists (including his own). And just a little over 15 years ago, in 2004, Kanye was on 25 different albums in a single year.
All in all, the past twenty years have seen Kanye produce over 250 songs for other artists, including numerous albums that went straight to the top of the charts.
In fact, he’s worked with some big names in his time as a producer. Especially with the way the industry works, it’s made for some interesting stories.
Kanye had worked with acclaimed lyricist and artist Nas multiple times before producing Jay-Z’s notorious Nas diss – and worked again with a number of times over the years, being a frequent collaborated and trusted producer for Nas throughout his career, even executive producing his first album in over six years, titled Nasir.
And way before either of them had made it big, Kanye even produced a track for Eminem when he was an up and coming star featured on an album made by a rapper’s “alter ego”.
Kanye’s Remixes Have Been Gold
While most producers are content either being known for their remixes, or shy away entirely from them, Kanye hops on a remix once in a blue moon and puts his initials all over the track.
This is common for rappers who frequently have a rap verses added near the end of a famous pop song that’s climbing the charts – think Girls Like You by Maroon 5 that got Cardi B added to it, or Kanye’s own verse on Katy Perry’s iconic E.T. – Kanye has also done remixes for some of the biggest artists either of their respective eras or, in one special case, a star for all time.
In 2008, Michael Jackson re-released an anniversary version of his famous album Thriller. Given that the album is noted for having 30 songs written for it that were whittled down to 9, Michael’s approval of West’s remix speaks volumes in his right. It gets even more interesting when you learn that the pair worked in the studio together, and Jackson told West he could “really sing”, possibly leading to his increased confidence in his voice that led to a newer style of music on his album 808s and Heartbreaks and continues to date.
Kanye has also worked on a remix for Justin Bieber in 2012 for the track Runaway Love and, while it may not technically be a remix, West also used the 1978 hit Intimate Friends for Alicia Keys’ hit Unbreakable, proving his prowess as a producer that can remake hits into even newer hits, working with music like art on a canvas (his words, not ours).