The five best beats Kanye West produced for Jay-Z
Kanye West and Jay-Z have known each other for a very long time, having met way back in the year 2000. West had produced a song for Beanie Sigel around that time, who was signed to Jay’s Roc-A-Fella Records, and people at the label were so impressed with the results that it was decided that this West guy should collaborate with Jay—and the pair duly got going.
According to reports, they would spend long hours through the night in the studio together, and, bit by bit, they built a partnership that would go on to produce some great songs over the years.
The most impressive work Jay and Ye ever made together is probably their 16-track album Watch the Throne, which was released in 2011 and saw them in a bragging sort of mood, rapping about their own success, skills and wealth. The album seemed to showcase how well-suited they were as musicians, but, behind the scenes, things were actually becoming quite complicated between the two.
It’s been said that, while they were making Watch the Throne, Jay and Ye started to clash with each other, getting into arguments about the record’s direction and otherwise not seeing eye to eye. They kept things together just enough to tour the album, but, really, their relationship had taken a big hit. It would never really recover, and today they can be heard dissing each other frequently. The feud is ugly, and Kanye, whose behaviour has clearly become unacceptable and extremely worrying over recent years, has even lashed out at Jay and Beyoncé’s kids.
Doing such a thing makes it seem unlikely that they’ll ever mend their relationship, but who knows? Certainly in the short term, fans of the pair’s collaborations will have to make do with what they’ve made together in the past, because new works are unlikely to materialise any time soon. But there are plenty of existing tracks to return to, so here’s a list of five of the best.
The best Kanye West and Jay-Z collaborations:
5. ‘Swagga Like Us’
Constructed around MIA’s famous track ‘Paper Planes,’ ‘Swagga Like Us’ marked Ye’s first production since his beloved mother died. He’d initially wanted to work with MIA in person, but, given that she was unavailable, he decided to sample from her music instead. Once he’d laid down the beat, he decided to send it over to TI, who, as well as accepting the offer to rap on it, decided he wanted to bring others on board, too. So he sent it to Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, both of whom duly agreed to rap on it.
TI later spoke about how the song was put together during an appearance on Fat Joe Talks. “We weren’t together,” TI explained. “I was first. [Co-CEO of the Blueprint Group] Gee Roberson gave me a beat that Kanye produced that had the M.I.A. sample. He got it to me with Kanye on the hook. Then he said, ‘You know what would be dope? If I could get Wayne and Hov on here too.’ I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’” But, sure enough, they made it happen.
4. ‘’03 Bonnie & Clyde’
‘’03 Bonnie & Clyde’ has the distinction of being Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s first musical collaboration together—and it was produced by none other than Kanye. It was recorded in 2002, with Jay instructing Kanye to make it “the best beat you ever made.” Ye had been listening to Tupac’s record The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory a lot at the time, and he wanted to borrow from it. He decided to sample the track ‘Me and My Girlfriend.’
Kanye himself spoke to MTV about the production of the track in 2002. “So I went home and called my dog, E Base, who plays a lot of instruments up at Baseline for me and Just Blaze,” he said. “I programmed the drums in ten minutes, and then he played all the different parts. This version is all live bass, live guitars, live chords on it. I brought it to Hov that night, he heard it, he thought of the video treatment before he thought of the rap. He just knew it was gonna be the one.”
3. ‘Otis’
Released as a single, ‘Otis’ was featured on Jay and Kanye’s album Watch the Throne. The “Otis” in question is, of course, Otis Redding, whose song ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ is sampled. Ye, who served as the track’s sole producer, chopped up Redding’s original song into different parts and used it to build this new track—and he was duly praised by critics for the results. It sounded pretty close to the music he’d made earlier in his career, particularly on The College Dropout.
Redding’s daughter, Karla Redding-Andrews, later responded to Ye and Jay’s track, stating that it was an honour to hear their celebration of her dad’s work. “There was a back and forth about whether the name of the song would be ‘Otis’ or ‘Otis Redding,’” she told Billboard in 2011. “And we just wanted to make sure lyrics and references in the song worked with the legacy of my father. To have two current, legendary artists use the legendary music of Otis Redding—we were quite honored.”
2. ‘Encore’
An unexpected tidbit about this song is that, in addition to Shawn Carter and Kanye West, who produced the track, there are two other notable names bearing a writing credit each: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The legendary Lennon-McCartney partnership struck again with this song in the middle of the 2000s, but not, exactly, in a direct way. The only reason they’re listed is because Kanye sampled John Holt’s cover of the Beatles’ song ‘I Will.’
‘Encore’ appeared on Jay-Z’s The Black Album, but it really gained a lot of popularity when it was mixed together with Linkin Park’s song ‘Numb’ for the mashup EP Collision Course. On paper, this shouldn’t necessarily have worked, but the EP, and particularly the ‘Numb/Encore’ single, became one of the era’s defining songs.
1. ‘Izzo (H.O.V.A.)’
One of Jay-Z’s true classics, ‘Izzo (H.O.V.A.),’ was produced by a young up-and-comer called Kanye West, who used The Jackson 5’s classic ‘I Want You Back’ as its core. The song became a huge hit and ultimately served to boost both men’s careers immeasurably.
In 2002, a year after the track was released, Kanye sat down with MTV to discuss the first time he showed Jay the beat—and it’s kind of sad to watch it now. Kanye is youthful and positive in the clip, and he even mentions how excited he was to tell his mother of Jay’s approval of his work. In light of the dark, paranoid path Ye is now travelling down, it’s hard not to be touched by his apparent innocence back then.
“I put it on,” Ye remembered during the interview. “He just start bobbing his head to it, and gave one of them looks like…[exhales]. That’s how you know you got a hit… Maybe about two or three minutes later, he just tapped me on the shoulder, he said, ‘H. to the izzo, V to the izza. For shizzle, my nizzle used to dribble down in VA…’ OOOHH. So I went to the bathroom right. I called my mom, I said, ‘Mom, we ’bout to make it! We really gonna to make it this time. We about to be on now!”