Why Jamie Foxx didn’t assume Kanye West would “make it”

Jamie Foxx is a distinguished determine in Hollywood and is a flexible performer. From films to music and tv, Foxx can sing, rap, act and do stand-up comedy. Nevertheless, like many within the trade, when Kanye West first approached him as an aspiring rapper, Foxx wasn’t positive he would succeed.

In 2005, a documentary named VH1 Pushed: Kanye West noticed a younger Jay-Z and Dame Sprint specific how they weren’t eager on signing Kanye West as an artist in 2002 and admitted they didn’t see a profession for him as an emcee.

Foxx held the identical opinion. In 2002, whereas recording his debut album, School Dropout, Kanye met Foxx shortly after his automotive accident. At this level, Ye was specializing in his second single, ‘Slow Jamz.’ 

Final yr, throughout an look on the Rap Radar podcast with Elliot Wilson and Brian ‘B.Bot’ Miller, Foxx recalled the day he first met Kanye and the way he thought ‘Slow Jamz’ would flop after recording it.

Detailing how he met the Chicago legend, Foxx instructed the hosts, “My boy Breyon brings this kid in, with his jaw busted, has a backpack on. I said, ‘Who’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s Kanye’. I said, ‘What is a Kanye?’, cause you know it was strange. He said, ‘Well, he’s a producer, but he also raps. He’s about to be the one’. I said okay. So I go up to him, and I said, ‘When people come to my house, they got to perform.”

He then proceeded to elucidate how West carried out for him, recalling, “The motherf**ker performs some sh*t that was so incredible, and then he goes, ‘I got a song that I think you’ll be good on’. We go in the studio, and he said the song goes, ‘She said she want some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross’. [I Said] ‘Okay, young fellow, I got it, let me sing it for you. She said she want some Maaaaaarvin’, and he was like, ‘Uh, don’t do that.’”

He continued, “He went from that smile to the frown, you know who he be like. I’m thinking he ain’t gonna make it, this song is whack right?! I go do a bad movie for like 12 weeks. It’s number 1 in the country. That’s how the music was birthed. So it came out of something organic, it was a hit song so that opened the door for me to then, further go on and, you know, do other things.”

Kanye and Foxx then labored on different music, together with West’s 2005 hit ‘Gold Digger’, and ever since, the pair have made magic. You possibly can hearken to Foxx’s Rap Radar interview beneath.