jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (2022)

directed by Coodie & Chike

James Brubaker

There’s a song called “Polaroid” on Michigan band Idle Ray’s eponymous full length debut, one of who knows how many projects indie stalwart Fred Thomas is currently involved with. In the song, Thomas sings from the perspective of someone who used to carry a Polaroid camera around with them, documenting the people they encountered at parties or shows. “I used to take pictures of people / so they'd remember I was there,” Thomas sings, letting us in on the speaker’s self-aware reflection. The speaker’s characterization of their past behavior seems somewhat counterintuitive, and that’s the point—the speaker isn’t taking pictures to remember their friends, but to be remembered, themself, through the disruption that comes with taking a photo, from being both of and outside the moment, being the one with the camera. When I first heard “Polaroid,” I stopped whatever it was I doing so I could consider the song’s conceit for a moment, to let it surf then settle into ripples of memory, to consider both the hopeful excitement the song’s photographer must have felt snapping those photos, but also the awkward sadness underlying the facade. In that moment of consideration, I felt seen. I used to be one of those Polaroid people. It wasn’t always a Polaroid—though I had one for a while, eventually trading down to disposable cardboard cameras when the Polaroid film got harder to find and increasingly expensive. Either way, I wasn’t a photographer, didn’t really consider myself a photographer, but still carried shitty cameras with me pretty much everywhere I went so long as everywhere happened to include live music and/or drunk friends. I don’t have many, hardly any, really, of those old photos, though I wish I did. But then, as Thomas’s song points out, that was never really the point, was it?

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Watching jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, I found something of a kindred spirit in the film’s narrator, half of its directing team, Coodie. While this essay is ostensibly about said trilogy, it’s not going to be about Ye at all, not really. We all know his story, and sure, much of the trilogy’s joy comes from watching a young, hungry Kanye working hard in his pursuit of stardom. But by the trilogy’s third part, Ye’s presence in his own documentary becomes radio static, a fuzzy Kanye voice repeating fuzzy Kanye sentiments ad nauseum. By the end—surprise, surprise—the Kanye of it all turns out to be pretty insufferable. That’s okay, though, because the deeper we get into jeen-yuhs, the more it becomes clear that Coodie is the real main character, the blood and guts keeping the film’s thin skin alive. Over the course of jeen-yuhs, Coodie is positioned as an outsider’s insider, hungry but never obnoxiously so, looking for his own way to be remembered. At the beginning, he is an up-and-coming Chicago creative, cutting his teeth in local comedy clubs and hosting Channel Zero, a cable access show covering the city’s hip hop scene and its surrounding culture. As host, Coodie and his team would go to shows and other events to interview fans and artists. Like the narrator of Thomas’s “Polaroid,” when Coodie went out with his camera to document Chicago’s hip hop zeitgeist, he was doing it at least as much to be remembered himself. It’s not difficult to imagine that somewhere out in the multiverse there’s a version of Coodie who stuck with comedy and Channel Zero indefinitely, and wound up a modestly successful local-ish celebrity, a beloved cultural figure for Chicago hip hop fans, and that’s all. But then Kanye happened.

Long story short: Coodie and Kanye met, the prior recognized the latter’s obvious potential, and, inspired by Hoop Dreams, the pair decided that Coodie would follow Kanye around, cameras rolling, documenting as much as he could of the rapper/producer’s assent, with the ultimate goal of making a documentary about Kanye. Though jeen-yuhs begins with Coodie’s backstory, once Kanye enters the picture, Coodie takes a back seat, becomes the Nick Carroway to Kanye’s Gatsby: he rides in cars with Kanye, moves to New York City after Kanye, accompanies Kanye to the Roc-a-Fella offices where the MC raps along to his recording of “All Falls Down,” accompanies Kanye on visits with Donda, and makes the video for “Through the Wire”—where he first worked with directing partner Chike, who he met at MTV because of Kanye.

For most of the documentary’s first two installments, Coodie disappears into the narrative of Kanye’s rise to prominence to the point that, though it’s frequently Coodie behind the camera, it’s Kanye’s point of view actually driving the film. That makes sense, it’s what viewers expect—jeen-yuhs is supposed to be about Kanye, describes itself as a “Kanye Trilogy,” even. Coodie’s story here can be found in his absence—chronicling Kanye’s career, for a while anyway, became Coodie’s story. While the reported three hundred hours of footage Coodie and Chike accumulated over almost two decades of on-again off-again filming really isn’t that much, a quick look at Coodie’s IMDb page shows us that many of his other projects are Kanye related. In jeen-yuhs, and on paper, then, it certainly looks as if Coodie’s and Kanye’s stories are inexorably linked—of course Coodie disappears into Kanye’s story. But it’s still Coodie’s story being told here.

As it stands, the film’s first two parts give us just enough Coodie to remind us who he is, why he’s there. After the documentary’s introduction to Coodie as our guide into Kanye’s life, the most we’re given explicitly about Coodie is a brief interlude near the end of the documentary’s first part in which a trip back to Chicago to film Kanye segues into the filmmaker reflecting on his own family and the myriad ways they supported him and influenced his creative growth, an interesting, perhaps necessary even, bit of foreshadowing for Coodie’s eventual emergence as a bigger character in the film’s third part. And I suppose it’s inevitable that Coodie emerges as the central character by the end—as part two ends, his narration even notes that, with Kanye’s Grammy wins, the narrative seemed to be winding down, that they’d reached the logical conclusion of the story they’d set out to tell. Kanye had made it, and made it big. Of course that’s where the documentary would end. But we all know enough about Ye to know that such an ending would be disingenuous, at best, and so the story goes on. That’s when Coodie begins to emerge more fully, to become a presence worth remembering.

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To be clear, this documentary resonated with me deeply, but not because of Kanye. I’ve mostly stopped caring about Ye. I still revisit his classic albums, and give each new release an obligatory listen, more out of curiosity than anything else. But when I saw the early footage of Kanye featured in the trailer for jeen-yuhs, I knew I couldn’t not watch. Once the novelty and nostalgia of footage of young Kanye wore off, though, I found myself more invested in Coodie than Kanye. I was drawn in by the film’s introduction to Coodie, his drive, his desire to do something interesting, to be a part of the culture surrounding him, to make something. And I appreciated his willingness to throw himself so fully into the documentary project with Kanye, letting West’s story, West’s point of view, even, supplant his own, while still building a career around the unwieldy process of making a decades-spanning documentary. In Coodie, I saw a more talented, more ambitious version of the kid I used to be, carrying disposable cameras to punk shows, trying to be something of a pre-internet influencer in the Ohio music scene. When I was an undergraduate at Bowling Green State University in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, I hadn’t figured out my own story—I wanted to write, I wanted to be in a band, I wanted do something interesting, to do something worth remembering. But I wasn’t a very good writer at the time, and my attempts to form a band never panned out, so I decided to be interesting by becoming a booster for other peoples’ interesting things. My story became supporting bands I liked, trying to help build a scene. I started a bad ‘zine with a friend in Dayton, and covered bands I believed in, mostly local-ish acts: Fred Thomas’s various projects in Michigan; Aloha, who formed in Bowling Green, but were mostly living in Cleveland by then; the barely-there career of Dayton-based Ohio Casket. And I tried to book shows, successfully a few times, and make connections between bands and venues—I once delivered a demo and PR materials for Aloha to someone I sort of knew at a Columbus venue to (successfully) help them get a show, and another time passed Ohio Casket materials along to Howard’s Club H in Bowling Green in a failed attempt to get them a show. I boosted these bands, and others, online and IRL, effectively becoming an unofficial volunteer street team (there were occasional perks, like a test pressing of Aloha’s second LP, or an occasional advanced promo CD), and that was fine—I was doing it because I didn’t know what else to do, and I wanted to be part of something bigger than me, and, for a short while, that became my identity. It became my bigger, but still barely noteworthy version of taking “pictures of people / so they’d remember I was there.” Gradually, though, I started to figure out who I was, what I wanted to make for myself, and was able to slowly trade in that identity for something more tangible and personal.

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By the third part of jeen-yuhs, we see Coodie arriving at something more tangible and personal for him. Sure, this comes through in the film because, as a storyteller and filmmaker, what choice did he and Chike have? The documentary’s third installment picks up as West’s career begins to plow famously into an ever-increasing heap of controversy, and not long after Coodie and Chike’s access was all but cut off for six years. So yes, some of the shift in focus comes from necessity, but, too, that shift mirrors changes taking place in Coodie’s personal life. While Kanye was pushing boundaries of culture, musically and otherwise, distancing himself from his past and starting to lose control of his fame, Coodie became a proud father and started building his career beyond Kanye. The moments when Coodie pauses to invite us into his life provide us with a startling contrast between his own domestic and professional circumstances and whatever it was Kanye was getting up to for all those years.

That jeen-yuhs achieves this without judgment of Kanye is impressive, but perhaps that also speaks to how secure Coodie feels in the life he built—like most, he’ll never match Ye’s creative peaks, but he is happy with who he is. This becomes clearer as the film delves deeper into Kanye’s weird, unsettling journey into religion, politics, and marital collapse. As Coodie is drawn back into Kanye’s orbit, it becomes clear that a significant shift has occurred—whereas earlier, Coodie seemed to be almost absorbed into Kanye’s story, the third act finds Coodie clearly in control. He reunites with Kanye first at the Life of Pablo premiere, and then through a series of trips to various locales around the world, culminating in a visit to the Dominican Republic where Ye was hard at work on Donda. Here, Coodie mentions several times that nothing around Ye feels quite the same after their six year gap, and that difference, that distance is crucial to showing us something of Kanye we haven’t quite seen before, a sort of manufactured vulnerability, something that almost feels pure if not for an uncomfortable performativity—Coodie and his camera, without quite saying it, subtly convey a sense that maybe the only reason they were allowed back into Ye’s circle was because Ye believed maybe he had something to gain from their presence. 

The culmination of all this arrives in an odd moment, one of the oddest in the documentary, and, if we approach jeen-yuhs as being as much Coodie’s story as Kanye’s, it could be read as the climax. It’s the scene when Kanye is meeting with Michael Novogratz and Dan Barry, and comparing his treatment from the media following some of his Taylor Swift drama to being drawn and quartered. After a few moments of Kanye rambling about his martyrdom, Coodie stops filming. In the documentary, the reason isn’t quite clear, though there’s a sense, maybe, that Coodie is taking pity on Ye, is maybe even a little embarrassed for him. In an interview with Vulture, here’s how Coodie describes the choice: "Not for nothing, Kanye’s like my brother….No matter what we went through in life, and the separation and all, he’s still a brother to me. And I love him like a brother. So I wanted to pay close attention and make sure everything was okay. So that’s why I put the camera down. That was just me knowing I needed to pay attention and see what’s going on so I can intervene if I need to." Many documentarians keep filming there. But Coodie stops. Is it too much to suggest that this might be the moment when Coodie realizes that, in a way, he’s outgrown Kanye—that the mercy Coodie shows Kanye by not continuing to film this paranoid and uncomfortable, yet somehow still self-conscious (if not self-aware) rant might signify him leaving behind his past? 

I suppose we’ll probably never know, and that’s ok—Coodie doesn’t need to spill his guts all the way out for us in jeen-yuhs, it’s not being sold as “A Coodie Trilogy,” after all—but it’s Coodie’s journey that drives the film, from the mostly quiet man behind the lens to a fully realized subject in his own documentary, and that’s good because if it were truly just about Kanye, I can’t imagine it being anything but unwatchable. But the film is watchable, very watchable, and it’s because Coodie showed up with his camera, day after day, filming Kanye, while telling us his own story. He may have started the project showing up with his video camera so everyone else would remember he was there, but eventually he came to the crucial realization that the best way to make others remember is to find his own voice.

What eventually busted me out of my own loop of boosting other peoples’ work and trying to be a big time scene guy was when I committed to the idea of putting in the work to write—that meant spending most of my free time reading and writing, not organizing shows or promoting bands I liked online. Though I still enjoyed going to shows, and the bands I’d always supported, I realized I didn’t need them to help define my identity. And maybe there’s something similar in Coodie’s story as it plays out in jeen-yuhs: he clearly still cares about, and loves Ye, but by the end of act three, he realizes that maybe he no longer needs him.

James Brubaker is the author of The Taxidermist's Catalog, Black Magic Death Sphere: (science) fictions, Liner Notes, and Pilot Season. He lives in Missouri with his wife, teachers writing, and runs Southeast Missouri State University Press.