Inside the Making of Netflix’s Revealing Kanye West Documentary ‘Jeen-Yuhs’ – Culture

Inevitably, the scenes with Donda West are the most heartbreaking. Her loss in 2007 is the crater around which Ye’s actions still orbit. “Losing Mama West as well, that was a catalyst to our separation,” Coodie says, “because she [always made sure] to be like, ‘Coodie, come over here.’” Donda first appears halfway into part one, when Ye visits her while back in Chicago at a particularly fraught moment–he’s been subjected to his first ever rap beef, despite everyone still resisting the idea of him as a rapper. Their connection — Ye’s dependence on her as an emotional rock, her role as his biggest supporter, champion and fan — is palpable, and sweet. It’s there in the way his spirits immediately lift when he sees her, the way she raps bars from his own unreleased songs back to him, the way her advice centers and soothes him. It’s also clear how the volatile cocktail of humility and confidence that she instilled in him could tip the wrong way in her absence.

“It’s like when you’re in the house with your mom, you’re not cursing,” Coodie says. “You’re [being] respectful [in front of] your parents, then you go outside with your guys, like You motherfucking shit etc. But, man, you got to understand, to be somebody who loses their parent right at the moment of what you were both aspiring to. Donda said ’Okay, Kanye, you want to do this? I got you. I’m going to help you make it happen.’ He gets there, and then he loses his mom in front of the public. I really can’t say how he changed with what happened. The pressure… now you’re a quarterback out on the field with no blockers, just people trying to tackle you.”

In part two of jeen-yuhs, Coodie says that he wanted to put the doc out in 2006, but by then Ye’s celebrity had grown to a point where he didn’t want the public to see “the real him”—West explained that he was now “playing a role.” “With a celebrity, there’s a whole other person from who you see on TV,” Coodie says. Ye’s stance changed in 2014, when “he had me and Chike come to Calabasas and we talked about how we were going to put this doc together,” Coodie reveals. “He was asking us to help him with his messaging and the doc was the perfect thing to do that because it just showed the real Kanye, you know what I mean? But the Powers That Be got involved and it just didn’t happen. And that’s right before Kanye had the breakdown [when he was briefly hospitalized after a “psychiatric emergency” on the Saint Pablo Tour. I just felt like we should have fought back. We should have fought them more and made this happen. It seemed like he was calling us for help at that moment.”