Legend Has It

Tailing Kanye West for two turbulent decades.

- CRAIG JENKINS

FANDOM IS AN orthodoxy, a belief in a shared set of accepted truths, discouraging of heretical stances. If you love Jay-Z, you likely know who Emory is and what Young Guru does, and you probably have a lot to say about 1997’s platinum-selling, critically appreciated In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 being underrated. If you’re a Swiftie, you love puzzles but loathe scooters. If you love Yeezy, you believe the multi-hyphenate fashion-and-music mogul born Kanye West continues to succeed because he heeds no compass but his own. This inspires unique artistry as well as outrage, and Ye’s incredible longevity in the face of a string of potentially career-ending gaffes is possible proof he knows something the rest of us don’t. People take him for granted, then he delivers. That is the Kanye gospel.

jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy—a three-part Netflix documentary directed by Clarence “Coodie” Simmons Jr. and Chike Ozah, who made videos for Kanye’s “Through the Wire” and “Jesus Walks” and Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat”—is rolling out over three consecutive weeks, each installment offering an hour and a half of the inner workings of Ye’s career as gleaned from hundreds of hours of old camcorder footage. They started filming Kanye long before The College Dropout, so jeen-yuhs tells both the story of Ye and the story of the strangeness of its own birth as the quintessential visual document of his career.

JEEN-YUHS: A KANYE TRILOGY DIRECTED BY CLARENCE “COODIE” SIMMONS JR. AND CHIKE OZAH. NETFLIX.

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