Ye is an American hip-hop artist who also dabbles in singing, songwriting, record production, and the fashion industry.
Although she was born in Atlanta, she grew up in Chicago, West rose to prominence in the early 2000s as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records, where he was responsible for creating the “chipmunk soul” sampling style and generating hit singles for a number of different acts.
The College Dropout (2004), his first studio album, was a critical and commercial success and he went on to pursue a successful solo career as a rapper. Later that year, he launched the record label GOOD Music.
West’s albums Late Registration (2005), Graduation (2007), and 808s & Heartbreak (2009) showcase his experimentation with a wide range of musical styles and instruments (2008).
Both the critical and economic success of his fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), and his sixth album, Yeezus (2013), were well received.
West’s albums The Life of Pablo (2016) and Ye (2018) showcase his growing musical versatility, while Jesus Is King (2001) shows his interest in Christian and gospel music (2019).
His ninth album, Donda (2021), was met with mixed reviews from critics but continued financial success. Watch the Throne (2011), a collaboration with Jay-Z, and Kids See Ghosts (2018), a collaboration with Kid Cudi, round out West’s discography.
With over 160 million records sold, Kanye West is one of the most successful musicians of all time. He has received a whopping 22 Grammy Awards out of a total of 75 nominations, tying him for tenth place all-time and matching Jay-Z as the rapper with the most Grammy wins.
He has also won the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, the Billboard Artist Achievement Award, and a record-tying three Brit Awards for Best International Male Solo Artist.
Six of West’s albums made it onto Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2020, and he was also named as one of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time by the same magazine.
He has the fifth-most appearances on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and shares the record with Bob Dylan for the most albums to top the annual Pazz & Jop critic poll (133 entries).
In both 2005 and 2015, he was chosen by Time as one of the 100 most important persons in the world. As a fashion designer, he has worked with Nike, Louis Vuitton, Gap, and A.P.C. on apparel and footwear, and he also spearheaded the Yeezy collaboration between Nike and Adidas. He also started and runs the content studio Donda.
The media has paid close attention to West’s opinions because he is so outspoken. His behavior on social media, at award shows, and in other public settings, as well as his comments on the music industry, the fashion industry, U.S. politics, race, and slavery have all caused him to be the center of controversy.
The media has also focused on his mental health, his high-profile marriage to Kim Kardashian, and his Christian beliefs. West ran for president as an independent in 2020, focusing on the importance of maintaining a consistent life ethic.
After making a number of antisemitic comments in 2022, he was heavily denounced and lost numerous sponsors and partnerships, including his work with Adidas, Gap, and Balenciaga.
InNovember 2022, he publicly appeared with white nationalist Nick Fuentes to announce his presidential bid for 2024. In subsequent years, he openly embraced Nazi ideology, rejected the Holocaust, and admired Adolf Hitler.
Net Worth: | $1 Billion |
Name: | Kanye West |
Salary: | $180 Million |
Monthly Income: | $18 Million |
Date of Birth: | June 8, 1977 |
Age: | 45 Yrs |
Gender: | Male |
Height: | 5 ft 8 in (1.76 meters) |
Nationality: | USA |
Early life
West’s birthday is June 8th, 1977, and he was born in Atlanta. At the age of three, after his parents split up, he relocated to Chicago, Illinois with his mom. Ray West Sr. was an early black photojournalist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a former member of the Black Panther Party.
Ray became a Christian counselor later on and used seed money from his son to create the Good Water Store and Café in Lexington Park, Maryland, in 2006.
Donda C. West (née Williams), West’s mother and manager, taught English at Clark Atlanta University and chaired the English department at Chicago State University before retiring to manage her son.
West grew up in a middle class family in Chicago’s suburb of Oak Lawn, where he attended Polaris School for Individual Education.
West’s mother was a Fulbright Scholar and a professor at Nanjing University, thus he and his siblings moved there when he was 10 years old.
His mother recalls that despite being the only non-native speaker in class, West made friends easily and learned the language rapidly, but he has since forgotten it.
West responded, “I got A’s and B’s,” when asked about his academic performance in high school.
West’s interest in the arts was evident from a young age; he started writing poetry at the tender age of five.
Rapping for the first time in third school, West also began composing music in seventh grade and later sold his tunes to other musicians.
West met the producer No I.D., who ended up becoming a good buddy and guide for him.
557 West began his formal art education with painting studies at Chicago’s American Academy of Art in 1997, shortly after graduating from high school on a full scholarship. Soon after, he shifted his academic focus to English at Chicago State University.
He quit school when he was 20 years old to concentrate on his singing career. His mother, who was also a university professor, took this news very badly at first, but she eventually came to terms with it.
Career
In the mid-1990s, West launched his production career, initially focusing on providing instrumentals for up-and-coming musicians in his hometown. At the age of 19, he earned his first production credit when he was credited for producing eight tracks on the 1996 debut album of a Chicago rapper named Grav.
West was the first artist signed by Hip Hop Since 1978, a management and production business, in 1998.
West served as Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie’s ghost producer for a while. Without being able to release an album under his own name, West joined forces with GLC, Timmy G, Really Doe, and Arrowstar to establish the rap trio the Go-Getters while still remaining associated with D-Dot.
In 1999, the Go-Getters unveiled their lone full-length album titled World Record Holders. In the late 1990s, West served as producer for a number of critically acclaimed albums by established musicians.
Foxy Brown’s sophomore album Chyna Doll featured his production work on the album’s third track, and it became the first hip-hop album by a female rapper to top the U.S. Billboard 200 chart.
Musical style
All throughout his career, West has always experimented with new sounds and styles. West’s creative and lyrical approach to making progressive hip hop songs while preserving accessible pop sensibilities has grown more experimental in the years after his debut.
“West’s merging of numerous genres into the hip-hop fold is a sophisticated performance that questions the dominant white assumptions of what constitutes true ‘art’ music,” wrote Ed Ledsham of PopMatters.
People often use words like “funny,” “provocative,” and “articulate” to describe West’s rhyming style, which he uses to go from biting critique to comedic braggadocio to introspective tenderness.
West explains that he aspires to sound “just as ill as Jadakiss and just as intelligible as Will Smith,” implying that he wants his lyrics to be accessible to people of all races and genders.
West is often credited with creating “chipmunk-soul,” an early sampling technique that involved chopping and stretching pitched-up samples from old soul recordings, as well as a style of hip-hop production he himself pioneered.
West established the foundations of his style with his first studio album, 2004’s The College Dropout, which was praised for its complex hip-hop beats, timely themes, and awkward rhyming coupled with clever wordplay.
The record marked West’s departure from the prevailing gangster persona in hip hop in favor of more diverse, topical lyrical subjects, including higher education, materialism, self-consciousness, minimum-wage labor, institutional prejudice, class struggle, family, sexuality, his struggles in the music industry, and his middle-class upbringing.
Over the years, West has dabbled in a wide range of musical styles, including chamber pop on his 2005 album Late Registration, arena rock and europop on his 2007 album Graduation (2007), synth-driven electropop on 808s & Heartbreak, his fourth studio album (2008), Yeezus includes acid-house, drill, industrial rap, and trap (2013), The Life of Pablo (2016), Jesus is King (2019), and Donda feature gospel and Christian rap (2021), Kids See Ghosts is full of psychedelic sounds and trippy lyrics (2018).
Personal life
In 2021, West’s fortune reached a peak of $1.8 billion. Due in major part to Adidas ending their collaboration after a series of public antisemitic outbursts, Forbes assessed his net worth to have decreased to $400 million in October 2022.
Kanye Omari West changed his official name to simply “Ye” without a middle or last name in August 2021, citing “personal reasons” for the decision. In October, they were able to fulfill their wish.
For years prior to 2018, West had used Ye as a nickname, and in an interview that year, he explained that “ye” (/ji/) was the most often used word in the Bible, which prompted him to consider a name change: c] “It’s a biblical term that refers to the individual reading this sentence. Now I’m in your shoes.
I’m us. It’s us. Kanye, which means “the one,” was shortened to “Ye,” she added, adding that she and West had broken up but were still friends.
She later claimed that she only dated West to “get him off Kim’s case” and “give everyone something to talk about” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was rumored in January 2023 that West had secretly wed Australian architect and Yeezy employee Bianca Censori in a Beverly Hills wedding.
The Australian Minister for Education, Jason Clare, has stated that West may be denied a visa owing to his recent antisemitic sentiments in light of West’s subsequent journeys to Australia to visit Censori’s family.
Additionally, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry campaigned against admitting West.
hospitalization, but was never formally diagnosed.
It has been theorized that his paranoia stems from the fact that his wife was robbed in Paris. Upon the 30th of November, West was released from the hospital.
Both “FML” and his line on Vic Mensa’s “U Mad” make reference to his use of the antidepressant Lexapro, while his unreleased song “I Feel Like That” details his struggles with a wide range of common depressive and anxious symptoms.
West admitted to being dependent on opioids after receiving a prescription for them following liposuction, as stated in an interview he gave in 2018. Perhaps his 2016 nervous breakdown could be attributed to his addiction.
West has admitted to having frequent suicidal thoughts. Although West’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder was confirmed in 2016, it was not made public until his album Ye, released in 2018. He informed President Trump that the initial diagnosis was incorrect.
By 2019,he apparently accepted the diagnosis once more, but by 2022 he was reportedly claiming that the initial diagnosis was incorrect. In December of 2022, he mentioned that he might be autistic.
Musical influence
In the 21st century, West has received more adulation than perhaps any other popular music artist, from both music critics and fans to his contemporaries in the music industry and major people from the worlds of art and politics.
He was ranked third on NME’s list of the 100 most influential musicians in 2014. One of Billboard’s top editors, Alex Gale, called West “certainly one of the finest, and you could make the argument for the best musician of the 21st century.”
In a similar vein, Complex Magazine’s Dave Bry dubbed West the “most important artist of any art form, any genre” of the twenty-first century.
“Kanye’s power resides in his wild creativity and expressiveness, his mastery of form, and his deep and uncompromising attachment to a self-made aesthetic that he expresses through means that are entirely of the moment: rap music, digital downloads, fashion, Twitter, blogs, live streaming video,” wrote David Samuels in The Atlantic.
According to The Guardian’s Joe Muggs, “nobody else can sell as many CDs as West […] while being so firmly experimental and capable of shaking things up culturally and politically.”
Despite being called “a producer who created a signature sound and then abandoned it to his imitators,” “a flashy, free-spending sybarite with insightful things to say about college, culture, and economics,” and “an egomaniac with more than enough artistic firepower to back it up,” West was credited by Rolling Stone with transforming hip-mainstream. hop’s
Among his many accomplishments, West’s first three albums “cemented his reputation as a progressive rap pioneer,” as Shahzaib Hussain wrote for Highsnobiety. West, according to AllMusic editor Jason Birchmeier, “[shattered] certain clichés about rappers, becoming a success on his own terms without changing his image, his speech, or his music to suit any one musical mold” (416).
Westhas been blamed by Noisey’s Lawrence Burney for the genre’s (gangsta rap’s) commercial collapse. Rappers who didn’t fit the hardcore-gangster mold were given a chance after the release of his third studio album, which has been called a watershed moment in the industry.
Drake, Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert, and Chance the Rapper are just some of the hip-hop musicians who have publicly stated that West was an influence on their work. Many other creative people and musical acts from different genres have cited West as an inspiration for their own work.
Kanye West Net Worth
Ye, born Kanye Omari West, June 8, 1977) is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and fashion designer. Who has a total net worth of $1 Billion as of 2023. According to Forbes.