You’ve probably heard of Kanye West before; maybe you’ve seen him on a TV show, winning an award or causing controversy, but you’ve heard of him. He is one of America’s most renowned celebrities, and he’s an internationally famous rapper, songwriter, record producer and entrepreneur.
Kanye Omari West was born on June 8th, 1977, in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in a middle-class background. Maybe it was because of the influence of his parents, but Kanye showed an interest in poetry and visual arts since a very young age, and during his teenage years, he developed an interest for music; years he spent improving his rhyming skills with experimental beats using his keyboard.
He soon confessed to his parents that he wanted to take his music career more seriously, and dropped college at the age of 20 to pursue music professionally, but it wasn’t until 1998 that he really broke into the music industry when Jermaine Dupri used one of Kanye’s beats on his album “Life in 1472”; the young man had started as a small music producer until he met Jay-Z and produced “The Blueprint” for him.
From that moment, he started to get recognition and his career only improved with time while he worked with famous, talented celebrities like Ludacris and Alicia Keys. Finally, in the year 2002, West got his chance to fulfill one of his aspirations: to become a rapper himself. He was signed to Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella as a recording artist, but unfortunately, before his debut album could be completed, a tragic accident happened to West, who almost lost his life in the car crash; even so, two years after his traumatic experienced, which he used as a source of inspiration, he released his debut album, “The College Dropout”.
The result surprised even Kanye himself: in its first week, the album sold 440,000 copies, and some single quickly escalated positions in the charts, winning him tons of awards. A year later, he released his second album, “Late Registration”, and the third, “Graduation”, in 2007. Five more albums came after that, but weren’t as successful as the others, including the most recent one, “The Life of Pablo” (2016).
West started dating the famous celebrity Kim Kardashian, a longtime friend of his, in 2012, and got engaged with her the next year, and married in 2014. The marriage has now two children, North and Saint West.
