trick Kanye had improved upon), there were scores of live strings and congas and choirs that blew way past the budget.īy 2013, that nerdy Chicago beat-maker, now 36, had amassed 21 Grammys and five multi-platinum solo albums (plus another with Jay-Z), the most recent of which critics had called a generational masterpiece. And all of it sounded so good: Beyond the chipmunk soul sample work (a No I.D. In the era of 50 Cent and The Game, this was a middle-class Midwestern guy whose ambition so happened to be insane, who'd be dreaming one minute of walking out on his retail job and the next of bringing Jesus to the club as his plus-one. We knew the backstory, too: A nerdy beat-maker rises through the ranks of the premier NYC street-rap label, leaps atop boardroom tables to convince powers-that-be of his solo promise, shatters his jaw in a rented Lexus. The same month 'Slow Jamz' topped the charts, I downloaded The College Dropout on LimeWire, my pirating platform of choice the files were mislabeled 'KAYNE WEST.' People who once worshipped Kanye have relitigated their relationship with the rapper in recent years, but it's hard to overstate how it felt back then, listening to a Chicago rap album we all knew was an all-timer. 1, and there's justice in that milestone going to Twista, the unsung hometown hero, even if the song was pure Kanye. 'Slow Jamz' marked the first time a Chicago rapper had scored a Billboard No. I knew Twista, the Guinness-certified fastest rapper alive, from the radio, where they'd sometimes play his song 'Po Pimp' with the West Side group Do or Die that was about as big as it got where local rap was concerned. (New to me, at least.) 'Slow Jamz' was goofy but sort of genius - the helium Luther Vandross sample, the 'state of R&B' meta-commentary, the lines that made you cackle at their knuckleheaded audacity. The year I was old enough to drive on Lake Shore, the biggest song in my high school - and for one week, the entire country - was 'Slow Jamz' by Twista, which featured Jamie Foxx and a new guy, Kanye West.

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