Pass It On: Look, It’s 19-Year-Old Kanye Rapping In 1996
He even references Alanis Morissette, almost as if to prove it's 1996.
To the casual observer, Kanye West may possess an arrogance bordering on delusion, but followers of his career know that he is a driven, ambitious workaholic, who took years to break through as a producer, and even longer still to do so a performer.
This work ethic saw a 19-year-old Kanye regularly commute from his home city of Chicago to New York to perform at various gigs, including the opening of 6th Avenue record store Fat Beats. In the below footage he freestyle about Alanis Morissette, almost as if to prove the footage is genuinely from 1996.
The footage came to light when former store manager DJ Eclipse, who now presents on radio station WNYU, was transferring old Hi-8 tapes and stumbled across a familiar-looking lad.
He told Complex: “Yesterday I started converting old Hi8 video tapes to DVD and came across some interesting footage from that day. Now we had a lot of the usual suspects in the place that day […] but what took me by surprise was the appearance of this 19-year-old kid who at that time nobody knew – at least in NYC.”
God damn, Yeezy.