Kanye West: The Life Story Behind Rap's Loudest Star

Atlanta, Chicago and the Childhood of Kanye Omari West

Kanye Omari West was born on 8 June 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Donda West, an English professor, and Ray West, a photojournalist who had once been a member of the Black Panther Party, and when Kanye was three his parents divorced and his mother took him to Chicago, Illinois, where he grew up on the South Side. Donda West taught at Chicago State University, and her house was full of books, records and conversation, while his father, who later became a Christian counsellor, stayed in his life, and the combination of a university household and a tough Chicago neighbourhood gave Kanye two worlds at once, one of classrooms and literature, the other of street corners and rap. He attended Polaris High School in the suburb of Oak Lawn, where he was a good student but already more interested in music than in class, spending his free time making beats on a sampler in his bedroom.

At the age of ten Kanye spent a year in Nanjing, China, where his mother was teaching at Nanjing University as part of an exchange programme, an experience he later said opened his eyes to a world beyond Chicago and gave him a confidence about travelling that stayed with him. Back in Chicago he began producing beats seriously as a teenager, selling them to local rappers and learning the craft of sampling, chopping up old soul records and speeding them up until they sounded new, a technique that would become his signature. He enrolled at Chicago State University, where his mother worked, and then transferred to the American Academy of Art, but he left both without a degree, a decision his mother supported even though it worried her, because she could see that music was the only thing he wanted to do.

The Chicago that shaped Kanye was the Chicago of the 1990s, a city with a rich musical history, from blues and gospel to house music and the rap of Common, and Kanye absorbed all of it, working in studios, meeting other young producers and building a reputation as a beatmaker who could make a sample sing. He was not yet a rapper in anyone’s eyes, and the record labels that bought his beats did not take his rhymes seriously, a rejection that became the central wound of his early career and the fuel for everything that followed. He moved to New York in 2000, carrying his beats and his ambition, and knocked on doors until Roc-A-Fella Records, the label run by Jay-Z and Damon Dash, finally let him in, first as a producer, then, reluctantly, as an artist.

A Producer in the Shadows: The Blueprint Years

The breakthrough as a producer came in 2001, when Kanye made several beats for Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint, including the soulful Izzo (H.O.V.A.) and the driving Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love), and the album, released on 11 September 2001, became one of the most acclaimed rap records of its era, with Kanye’s chipmunk-soul sound, sped-up vocal samples over hard drums, instantly recognisable. Suddenly every rapper wanted a Kanye beat, and he supplied them, producing for Talib Kweli, Ludacris, Alicia Keys and others, while quietly recording his own songs and playing them for anyone who would listen. Roc-A-Fella signed him as a rapper in 2002, but the label’s executives were sceptical, and Kanye later said he felt like an outsider, a middle-class kid with a pink polo shirt in a world of street rappers, a feeling he turned into the theme of his first album.

On 23 October 2002, driving home from a late studio session in Los Angeles, Kanye fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his rented Lexus into an oncoming car, breaking his jaw in three places and requiring surgery in which his mouth was wired shut for weeks. Two weeks after the accident, with his jaw still wired, he recorded Through the Wire, rapping through the metal in his mouth about the crash, the hospital and his determination to succeed, and the song, built around a sped-up sample of Chaka Khan’s Through the Fire, became the first single of his career and one of the most striking debut singles in rap history. The crash gave him a story, a scar and a deadline: he had nearly died, and he was not going to waste the second chance, and the urgency of that moment runs through every song on the album that followed.

The College Dropout, released in February 2004, was built around that story, and it was unlike anything else in rap at the time: funny, thoughtful, sceptical of both the streets and the university, full of gospel choirs, soul samples and jokes about student loans, with guest appearances from Jay-Z, Mos Def, Common and Twista. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and produced the hits Jesus Walks, a gospel rap song about faith that radio had said would never work, All Falls Down and Slow Jamz, the last of which gave Twista a number-one single. Critics praised the album’s honesty and its humour, and it established Kanye as a rapper who could talk about middle-class life, religion and self-doubt without pretending to be someone he was not.

Through the Wire: The Crash That Made a Rapper

Late Registration, released in August 2005, was more ambitious still, with orchestral arrangements by the film composer Jon Brion, and it produced Gold Digger, a number-one hit featuring Jamie Foxx, and Touch the Sky, and it won the Grammy for Best Rap Album while debuting at number one. Kanye’s public profile grew with the record, and so did his willingness to speak his mind: in September 2005, during a live television fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina relief, he said that the president did not care about Black people, a remark that made headlines for weeks and marked the beginning of his career as a public provocateur as well as a musician. He followed the album with the Glow in the Dark tour, a large-scale arena show with a science-fiction storyline, and he began to talk about fashion, design and art with the same confidence he brought to music.

Graduation, released in September 2007, was a deliberate pop turn, built around electronic sounds and stadium choruses, and its lead single Stronger, which sampled Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, became one of the biggest songs of the year. The album was released on the same day as 50 Cent’s Curtis, and the two rappers turned the coincidence into a contest, with Kanye outselling 50 Cent by a wide margin, a result that was treated as a changing of the guard in hip-hop, from gangsta rap to a more varied, melodic sound. Graduation won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and its success gave Kanye the confidence to take bigger risks, which he did immediately, with an album that abandoned rap almost entirely.

That album was 808s & Heartbreak, released in November 2008, a cold, electronic record built around Auto-Tune singing rather than rapping, written after the death of his mother, Donda West, in November 2007 following cosmetic surgery, and the end of his engagement to Alexis Phifer. The album’s songs, Love Lockdown and Heartless, were spare and wounded, and at the time many critics were unsure what to make of it, but its influence turned out to be enormous, shaping the sound of Drake, Kid Cudi, The Weeknd and a whole generation of melodic rap that followed. It was the first time Kanye had made a record that was more about feeling than about skill, and the risk of it, a rap star singing through a machine about grief, remains one of the bravest moves of his career.

The College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation

The most famous night of Kanye’s career came on 13 September 2009, at the MTV Video Music Awards, when he walked on stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video, took the microphone and said that Beyoncé had made one of the best videos of all time, an interruption that was booed in the room, condemned across the media and apologised for the next day, and which followed him for years. He left the United States for Hawaii, where he recorded My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, an album built around excess, guilt and redemption, with contributions from Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Pusha T, Bon Iver and Rihanna, and released in November 2010 to near-universal acclaim, with critics calling it one of the best albums of the decade. Its singles, Power, Runaway and All of the Lights, were enormous, and the short film Runaway, which he directed, turned the album into a visual event as well as a record.

In 2011 he recorded Watch the Throne with Jay-Z, a luxury-rap album about wealth, friendship and competition that produced the hits Otis and Niggas in Paris, and the two rappers toured it together in arenas around the world, a victory lap for two artists at the top of their game. He also founded the creative collective DONDA, named after his mother, and the label GOOD Music, which signed Pusha T, Big Sean and Kid Cudi, and he began to present himself as a designer and creative director as much as a musician, talking about architecture, furniture and fashion in interviews that confused as many people as they inspired. The ambition was real, even when the execution was messy, and it set the pattern for the next decade, in which Kanye’s music, fashion and public statements would all compete for attention at the same time.

Yeezus, released in June 2013, was another sharp turn, a harsh, industrial record with abrasive electronics, minimal melodies and lyrics about race, religion and fame, produced with Daft Punk, Rick Rubin and others, and it divided listeners even as critics praised its boldness. He toured it with a large-scale stage show featuring a mountain, a masked figure and a long sermon-like speech each night, and he used the tour’s interviews to argue that he deserved the same respect as the great designers and artists he admired, a claim that made him sound arrogant to some and visionary to others. The album’s aggression was matched by its honesty: songs like New Slaves and Blood on the Leaves dealt with consumerism, slavery and betrayal in ways that few pop records attempted, and Yeezus remains the album his most devoted fans argue about most.

808s, the VMA Night and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

The Life of Pablo, released in February 2016, was a messy, gospel-soaked record that Kanye kept changing after its release, updating tracks on streaming services as if the album were a living document, and its songs, Ultralight Beam, Famous and Father Stretch My Hands, became fixtures of his live shows. In 2018 he released two short albums, Ye, recorded in Wyoming after a public breakdown and a hospital stay, and Kids See Ghosts with Kid Cudi, both of which dealt openly with his bipolar disorder, a condition he had spoken about publicly for the first time that year. He also produced five albums in five weeks that summer, for Pusha T, Nas, Teyana Taylor and himself, a burst of work that showed his production instincts were still sharp even when his public life was chaotic.

Jesus Is King, released in October 2019, was a gospel album, with choirs, organ and lyrics about faith, and it came with a film of the same name and a weekly church service, Sunday Service, in which a choir performed gospel versions of his songs in parks, churches and, eventually, at the Coachella festival. The turn to gospel surprised many listeners, but it connected with the thread of faith that had run through his music since Jesus Walks, and the album won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album. Donda, released in August 2021 and named for his late mother, was a long, sprawling record, over 27 tracks, with guest appearances from Jay-Z, Lil Baby, The Weeknd and others, and it was presented at listening events in stadiums in Atlanta and Chicago, including one in which he rebuilt his childhood home on stage.

Vultures 1, released in February 2024 as a collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign under the name ¥$, returned Kanye to the charts, with the song Carnival reaching number one, his first chart-topper in years, and it was followed by Vultures 2 later that year. The albums were released independently, after his major-label and fashion partnerships had ended, and they were controversial, not only for the music but for the antisemitic statements he had made in 2022, which had cost him his partnership with Adidas and led to widespread condemnation. The Vultures era showed the same pattern as the rest of his career: a genuine musical instinct, a loyal audience, and a public life that kept getting in the way of the work.

Yeezus, Pablo, Donda and the Gospel Turn

Yeezy, the fashion line Kanye built with Adidas from 2015, became one of the most successful celebrity fashion ventures ever, with the Yeezy Boost sneakers selling out in minutes and reselling for many times their retail price, and it made him, by some estimates, a billionaire, a claim he repeated often and proudly. The partnership ended in October 2022, after Kanye made a series of antisemitic remarks on social media and in interviews, and Adidas, along with the talent agency CAA, the fashion house Balenciaga and the retailer Gap, cut ties with him within days, a collapse that cost him most of his fortune and made him a pariah in much of the industry. He apologised at times and then repeated the remarks, a cycle that left even his supporters unsure what to say, and the episode remains the most damaging of his public life, overshadowing the music that followed it.

His personal life has been as public as his career. He married Kim Kardashian in May 2014 in Florence, Italy, in a wedding that was covered around the world, and the couple had four children, North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm, before divorcing in 2022, a split that played out in public statements, social media posts and legal filings. Before that he had been engaged to Alexis Phifer and had dated the model Amber Rose, and after the divorce he married Bianca Censori, an architect who worked for Yeezy, in a private ceremony in late 2022. His relationship with his children, and his public disputes with Kardashian over their upbringing, have been a constant subject of tabloid coverage, and he has spoken about his bipolar disorder as a factor in his behaviour, a disclosure that has drawn both sympathy and criticism.

By 2025 Kanye West’s place in music was secure and his reputation was complicated, a combination that defines his story. He has won 24 Grammy Awards, one of the highest totals for any artist, and his albums, from The College Dropout to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, are routinely named among the greatest rap records ever made, while his production work, from The Blueprint to the records he made for others, changed the sound of hip-hop. At the same time, the controversies, the lost partnerships and the statements that cost him his fashion empire have made him one of the most argued-about figures in popular culture, and the argument shows no sign of ending, because the music keeps coming and the headlines keep following it.

Gold Digger, the lead single from Late Registration, spent ten weeks at number one on the Hot 100, one of the longest runs of the decade, and its success was driven by a Jamie Foxx vocal, a Ray Charles sample, and a lyric about a woman who takes a man’s money, a song that is funny, catchy, and, in its way, a commentary on relationships, on money, and on fame, and the song’s video, which featured Foxx, became a staple of MTV, and the track remains, more than twenty years later, one of Kanye’s most played songs, a standard that other rappers still reference, and a proof that a pop hit, well made, does not go out of fashion. He also released a series of free songs in 2010 under the name GOOD Fridays, one new track every Friday for months, a marketing idea that built anticipation for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and that showed a new way of releasing music, directly, for free, to fans, a model that other artists would copy, and that is a sign of his understanding of the internet, of how audiences find music, and of how to build excitement without a traditional single, a skill that he has used throughout his career, from the mixtapes to the surprise releases, and that is part of why he has remained relevant, even as the industry has changed around him.

The Saint Pablo Tour, which ran in 2016 in support of The Life of Pablo, featured a floating stage that moved above the audience, a design that was ambitious, spectacular, and, in the end, exhausting, and the tour ended early in November 2016, when Kanye was hospitalised after a series of erratic public appearances, a breakdown that he has described as a result of exhaustion, of grief, and of his bipolar disorder, and that led to a period away from music, a period that he spent recovering, and that he has spoken about with a mixture of honesty and regret, saying that he pushed himself too hard, and that he learned, from the experience, to take care of himself, a lesson that is, by any measure, important, and that is a reminder that even a star, with money, with fame, with a team, can break down, and that the break, however painful, can be a turning point, a moment that leads to a new chapter, in Kanye’s case, the Wyoming sessions of 2018, in which he produced five albums in five weeks, a burst of work that showed his production instincts were still sharp, even when his public life was chaotic.

The Wyoming sessions of 2018 produced five albums: Pusha T’s Daytona, Nas’s Nasir, Teyana Taylor’s K.T.S.E., Kids See Ghosts with Kid Cudi, and his own Ye, a short, seven-track record that dealt openly with his bipolar disorder, with songs like Yikes and Ghost Town, and that was recorded in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in a studio that was isolated, quiet, and, in Kanye’s words, a place to think, and the albums, which were released weekly, were a return to form, a proof that Kanye, as a producer, was still at the top of his game, and that his ear, his taste, and his ability to make a record, had not faded, even after a breakdown, and the sessions, which were covered extensively, showed a man who was working, who was focused, and who was, in his own way, healing, through music, and that is a story that is, by any measure, inspiring, and that is the key to understanding Kanye West, a producer who makes music to survive, and who survives by making music, and that is a legacy that goes beyond any single album, and that is as important as any hit he has had.

My Take:

When I play The College Dropout now, more than twenty years after it came out, the thing that still surprises me is how funny it is, and how rare that humour was in rap at the time. Kanye was joking about student loans, about working at the Gap, about his mother nagging him to finish college, and those jokes were also the most honest writing on the record, because they came from a life that did not fit the stories rap was supposed to tell. The humour was not a gimmick; it was a way of being serious about things that other rappers treated as jokes, like education and family, and it is the reason the album still feels fresh, because it sounds like a person talking rather than a persona performing. I think the comedy is the most underrated part of his talent, and the records that lost it, the ones where he tried to be only serious or only shocking, are the ones that have aged worst.

Through the Wire is the song I would play for anyone who doubts that Kanye West was ever a great rapper, because it is a performance under conditions that should have made it impossible. His jaw was wired shut, he could barely open his mouth, and he still delivered a verse that was clear, rhythmic and funny, about a crash that nearly killed him, and the Chaka Khan sample underneath it is so warm that the whole song feels like a celebration rather than a complaint. It is a reminder that his best work has always come from pressure, from a deadline, a rejection, a crisis, and that when the pressure disappeared, when he had money, fame and a fashion empire, the music often lost its edge. The lesson is not that suffering makes art, which is a lazy idea, but that Kanye’s art was always about proving something to someone, and the proof was sharpest when the doubt was loudest.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the album his defenders reach for, and I understand why, because it is the most complete thing he has ever made, a record where the production, the guests, the sequencing and the visuals all work together, and where the excess feels earned rather than indulgent. Runaway is a nine-minute apology that is also a boast, All of the Lights is a maximalist pop song with a dozen voices fighting for space, and Power is a statement of intent that still sounds enormous on a big speaker. But I think the album’s reputation also benefits from what came after it, from the fact that he never made anything quite as focused again, and that makes it easy to treat it as the end of a golden run rather than the middle of a career. It is a masterpiece, and it is also a warning, because an artist who makes a record that good at thirty-three can spend the next decade trying to top it, and Kanye has been trying ever since.

The producer in Kanye West is, to my mind, more important than the rapper, and it is the part of his career that will last longest. The Blueprint beats, the sped-up soul samples, the gospel choirs, the drums that hit like a door slamming, changed the sound of hip-hop in the early 2000s, and you can hear his influence in the work of producers who have never met him, from the chipmunk soul of the mid-2000s to the gospel rap of the 2010s to the melodic trap of today. He understood that a sample is not a shortcut but a conversation with the past, and he made records that sounded both old and new at the same time, which is why they have aged so well. The rapping was always the vehicle for the production, not the other way round, and when his production instincts faded, when the beats got simpler and the ideas got thinner, the records faded with them.

808s & Heartbreak is the album I admire most, even though it is not the one I enjoy most, because it is the clearest example of Kanye risking everything on an idea that nobody wanted. A rap star singing through Auto-Tune about grief, over cold electronic beats, with almost no rapping at all, should have been a disaster, and at the time plenty of people said it was, but within five years half of popular music sounded like it, from Drake to The Weeknd to Travis Scott, and the album’s influence is now so widespread that it is hard to hear how strange it once was. The grief behind it was real, his mother had died a year earlier, and the record’s coldness is the sound of a person who cannot feel anything properly yet, which is why it still moves me, because it is honest about numbness in a way that pop music rarely is.

The 2009 VMA incident is the moment I think about when people ask whether Kanye West was always controversial, because it was the first time the controversy was bigger than the music, and it set a pattern that has repeated ever since. He apologised, he went away, he made a great album, and then he did something else, and each time the cycle got shorter and the apologies got thinner, until by 2022 the statements were so serious that apologies were not enough and the partnerships ended. I do not think the VMA moment was the beginning of the problem; I think it was the first time the world saw a tendency that had always been there, a belief that his feelings in the moment mattered more than the room he was in, and a refusal to wait his turn. That tendency made great music, because it is the same impulse that makes an artist interrupt the expected, and it also made a public life that has become very hard to defend.

Yeezy is the part of the story that still puzzles me, because it was both a genuine achievement and a genuine delusion, and both things were true at the same time. The sneakers were well designed, the demand was real, the business was enormous, and Kanye’s eye for shape and colour was better than most professional designers, which is why the fashion world took him seriously in a way it had not taken other rappers. But the claim that he was a billionaire, and the belief that fashion would make him a different kind of figure, a designer on the level of the great houses, was always shaky, and when Adidas ended the partnership the whole edifice collapsed in days, which is what happens when a business is built on one person’s name. I think the fashion years taught him the wrong lesson, that he could do anything, and the music after them suffered, because he stopped listening to the people who used to tell him no.

Donda is the album that makes me saddest, because it is a record about a mother, made by a son who lost her, and it should have been his most moving work, but it is too long, too scattered and too full of guests to hold together, and the stadium listening events, with the rebuilt childhood home and the wedding dress, turned a private grief into a spectacle. There are beautiful moments on it, the opening prayer, the choir on Believe What I Say, the verse from Jay-Z, but they are buried under twenty-seven tracks of varying quality, and the album feels like a man who could not decide what he wanted to say about his mother, so he said everything. I think the record would have been stronger at half the length, and I think Kanye knew that, but by then nobody around him was willing to make the cut, and that is the story of his later career in miniature.

The antisemitic statements of 2022 are the part of this story that I cannot soften, and I do not think anyone should try. They were not jokes, they were not provocations, they were hateful, they were repeated, and they cost him his business, his agency and his standing in much of the industry, and those consequences were appropriate, because words from a person with his reach do real damage. What makes it worse is that the music of the Vultures era, which followed, was genuinely good in places, and Carnival was a number-one song, which means the audience was willing to separate the art from the artist in a way that the industry was not, and that separation is a question I do not have a clean answer for. I listen to the old records still, because they are part of the history of rap, but I listen to them differently now, and I think that is the honest thing to say.

If a new listener asked me where to start with Kanye West, I would begin with the first three albums, The College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation, because they show the arc clearly: a funny, hungry producer becoming a pop star, learning to make bigger records without losing the jokes or the soul samples, and each one is a complete world, with its own sound and its own story. After that I would go to 808s & Heartbreak, to hear the risk, and to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, to hear the peak, and I would stop there for a while, because the later records are harder to recommend without a long conversation about the man who made them. That is not a small catalogue, it is five albums that changed rap, and that is more than most artists manage in a lifetime, even if the lifetime after them has been difficult to watch.

Looking at the whole career, I see two Kanye Wests, and I think both are real: the producer who changed the sound of hip-hop, who made records that will be played in fifty years, and the public figure who kept saying the thing that ended the room, who lost a fashion empire and a large part of his audience to his own words. The first Kanye is one of the most important musicians of the twenty-first century, and the second is a cautionary tale about what happens when nobody around a famous person says no, and the tragedy is that the second Kanye has made it harder to celebrate the first. I do not know what the next chapter looks like, and I am not sure anyone does, but the records from 2004 to 2010 are not going anywhere, and they are the reason his name will still be argued about long after the headlines fade.

Gold Digger is the single I keep coming back to, because it is a pop song that is also a joke, a Ray Charles sample, a Jamie Foxx vocal, a lyric about a woman who takes a man’s money, and it spent ten weeks at number one, which is a remarkable run, and it did so because it is funny, because it is catchy, and because it is, in its way, a commentary on relationships, on money, and on fame, and the song’s success, which was driven by radio, by its video, and by word of mouth, made it one of the biggest hits of the decade, and it remains, more than twenty years later, one of Kanye’s most played songs, a standard that other rappers still reference, and a proof that a pop hit, well made, does not go out of fashion, and that Kanye, who wrote it, understood, better than most, how to make a song that is both a hit and a joke, and that is a rare talent, and one that deserves respect, even from critics who do not like his later work.

The GOOD Fridays idea, in 2010, is the marketing move I admire most, because it was simple, one free song every Friday, for months, building anticipation for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and it worked, because it gave fans something to look forward to, it created a conversation, and it showed a new way of releasing music, directly, for free, to an audience that was online, and that is a model that other artists would copy, from Drake to Beyoncé, and that is a sign of Kanye’s understanding of the internet, of how audiences find music, and of how to build excitement without a traditional single, a skill that he has used throughout his career, and that is part of why he has remained relevant, even as the industry has changed around him, because he understands, better than most, that music is not just a product, it is a conversation, and that conversation, which he started with GOOD Fridays, is still going on, in every surprise release, in every listening event, in every tweet.

Ye, the 2018 album recorded in Wyoming, is the record I find most moving, because it is short, seven tracks, and it deals openly with bipolar disorder, with songs like Yikes, in which Kanye raps about his mental health, and Ghost Town, a song about freedom, about letting go, and the album’s cover, a photograph of the Wyoming mountains with the words I hate being bipolar it’s awesome written on it, is a statement, a joke, a confession, all at once, and the record, which was made after a breakdown, after a hospitalisation, is a proof that Kanye, as an artist, was still willing to be honest, to be vulnerable, to tell the truth, even when the truth was difficult, and that honesty, which is the reason his best work connects, is also the reason Ye, which is flawed, uneven, and, in places, brilliant, is worth listening to, not as a masterpiece, but as a document, a record of a man trying to understand himself, and that is a rare thing, in pop, and one that deserves respect.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Kanye West born and raised?

Kanye West was born on 8 June 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, and was raised mainly in Chicago, Illinois, by his mother, Donda West, an English professor at Chicago State University.

How did Kanye West first become famous?

He first became famous as a producer, making beats for Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint in 2001, before his debut album The College Dropout in 2004 made him a star as a rapper.

What happened in Kanye West’s 2002 car crash?

In October 2002 he fell asleep while driving in Los Angeles and crashed, breaking his jaw in three places; he recorded Through the Wire two weeks later with his jaw still wired shut.

How many Grammy Awards has Kanye West won?

He has won 24 Grammy Awards, one of the highest totals for any artist, including Best Rap Album for The College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation.

Why did Adidas end its partnership with Kanye West?

Adidas ended the Yeezy partnership in October 2022 after Kanye made a series of antisemitic remarks on social media and in interviews, and several other companies cut ties with him at the same time.

What is Kanye West’s album Donda named after?

Donda, released in 2021, is named after his mother, Donda West, who died in November 2007, and the album was presented at stadium listening events in Atlanta and Chicago.