June 08

Kanye Omari West's Birthday
 

A small rapper with a big mouth and a industry’s most influential movers and shakers since the beginning of the millennium. Originating as a producer and eventually crafting his own set of multiplatinum smash hit albums, West represents everything that is right about the genre and everything that is wrong about its culture of self-celebration.

West was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 8, 1977. He moved to Chicago with his mother when he was just three years old. Kanye saw a self-professed good student, but dropped out of college to pursue his musical career. Around the end of the nineties, he began producing for well-known acts like Jermaine Dupri and Foxy Brown. The big break came, however, in 2001 when he produced a number of tracks for Jay-Z’s landmark Blueprint.

Kanye continued to produce, but increasingly focused on making his own tracks. In 2004, West released The College Dropout, his first major album. He followed it up with Late Registration in 2005, critically acclaimed and massively successful. West’s signature style, both in production and performance, involves heavy sampling of up-tuned soul songs and witty, dense lyrics. He’s sampled everything from Ray Charles to Daft Punk, deftly crafting hip-hop epics that are more than the sum of their parts.

Even a musician as proficient and popular as West isn’t immune to controversy. In fact, one might argue that West invites or even manufactures minor scandals and missteps. During an NBC telethon after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, West famously took President George W. Bush to task for his lack of action, claiming that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Bush would later describe this as the nadir of his Presidency. West’s “big” personality (and that’s putting it charitably) is best viewed at the MTV Video Music Awards, in which it has become something of an unofficial tradition for West to do or say something ridiculous. Not only has he stormed out after being passed over for awards, he’s also claimed that his loss had something to do with his skin color. When he lost to Justice for Best Video, he stormed the stage and made the case for why he should have won. Any musician with an oversized ego can storm out of a disappointing awards ceremony, but West’s insane antics take a special brand of self-aggrandizement. Not to mention his most famous outburst, in which he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for “Best Female Video” to argue that it should have gone to Beyonce instead. That’s right – Kanye even feels that he should be given the stage to discuss awards that are by definition unrelated to his entire gender.

One thing cannot be denied, however – West is interesting. For his sake, we can be glad that he’s got the talent and moneymaking instinct to back up his outsized personality. That moneymaking talent was exponentially increased to the tenth power when he teamed with Jay-Z for their collaborative album, Watch the Throne. The internet was abuzz trying to guess the mysterious title of their hit single H.A.M. What does the acronym H.A.M stand for?  According to the growing science of etymology of rap jargon, H.A.M  stands for: hard as a motherfucker, However, we like some of the other guesses from less rap-savvy sources included Hung and Macho, Hump a Monkey, and our obvious favorite  - Hors d'oeuvres and Murcielagos. But regardless of the hype around the title, H.A.M for most rap aficionados was more of a wonky soufflé than a rap classic.

So to celebrate Kanye's birthday, we suggest watching Harold and Maude (1971) only because its initials are H.A.M. and making a ham soufflé since, as Watch the Throne demonstrates, with such talent, even a wonky soufflé of Hip-Hop royalty can be damn tasty.
 

Ingredients
 

Serves 4