JAY-Z and Kanye West have vastly different creative processes, and the latter’s frequent collaborator Malik Yusef has now elaborated on their differences.
During a conversation with the TFU Podcast published on Friday (July 5), he broke down the way both moguls operate.
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“Hov works the least amount of hard on his music than anybody else I’ve ever met,” he said. “Like with Kanye, we’ll stay up for 36 hours, go to sleep for four and come back and do another 30. Hov — he just too good. Hov’s ridiculous. I mean, Kanye and Hov for me is [equal]; they just have different approaches.”
He continued: “Hov be like, ‘Can you get to the studio at 6?’ By 10, we got three songs done. Kanye, he’ll have three months and have no songs done. Kanye will take a whole album and be like, ‘We have some good stuff on here. Aight, let’s start the album for real now.’”
Kanye West and JAY-Z have had quite a complicated relationship in the years since their 2011 joint album Watch The Throne.
Last year, a mini documentary on the making of Ye’s Donda leaked online. The five-minute film featured a behind-the-scenes look at Ye’s unorthodox creative process and turbulent emotional state.
One particularly noteworthy scene captured him on a phone call inside a locker room, threatening to take anybody who doesn’t attend his listening party off the album — JAY-Z included.
“Everybody that’s not here, I’m taking their verses off,” he said. “I’m taking JAY-Z verse, I’m taking— if there’s anybody not here on the porch with me, they’re not on this version.”
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After hanging up, he looked at the camera and added with a laugh: “How do you even describe these kind of conversations, bro?”
JAY-Z’s verse on “Jail” remained on Donda when it was being previewed for audiences prior to the official release — this marked the duo’s first collaboration in five years following Drake’s 2016 song “Pop Style.”
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After playing the Jigga version during his first two listening sessions, though, the Yeezy boss replaced Hov’s verse with one by DaBaby. This decision that not only disappointed a number of fans, but was also criticized due to the North Carolina rapper’s homophobic comments at Rolling Loud Miami just weeks prior.
