Is “Wendy” from Kanye West’s ‘Homecoming’ a real person?
As much as people may hate his antics in 2024, Kanye West’s 2007 album Graduation was groundbreaking and will continue to be recognised as the turning point in hip-hop history that it was.
Not only did it advance rap music, but it also shifted the sonics of hip-hop. With Graduation, West incorporated more digital and electronic sounds into his beats, and, slowly, hip-hop began to embrace synthesis and sequencing, two things typically associated with electronic dance music.
This set the culture on a particular path and saw people become more receptive to alternative, experimental, and less aggressive forms of hip-hop, which paved the way for MCs such as Kid Cudi, Chance The Rapper and Mac Miller.
Songs such as ‘Stronger’ and ‘Good Life’ performed exceptionally well commercially. However, one of the most popular tracks from the album is ‘Homecoming.’ The song was released as the fifth single of the project and was a jaunty hip-hop ballad.
The song’s lyrics are actually a revision of the 2004 Kanye West track ‘Home’ from his mixtape, Freshmen Adjustment Vol 1. It initially featured John Legend and took inspiration from Common’s 1994 track, ‘I Used to Love H.E.R’, a song about falling out of love with hip-hop.
However, ‘Home’ wasn’t about falling out of love with the genre or even about love; it was an ode to his hometown, Chicago. In his first verse, West rhymes, “I met this girl when I was three years old.” But the emcee was speaking metaphorically about the Illinois city as he moved with his mother from Atlanta to Chicago at the age of three.
On the track, he even specifies in the lyrics he is talking about Chicago when he raps, “In the interview, I’m representin’ you, makin’ you proud / Shoot for the stars, so if you fall, you land on a cloud / Jump in the crowd, spark your lighters, wave ’em around / If you don’t know by now, I’m talkin’ ’bout Chi-Town.”
‘Homecoming’, which directly uses lyrics from ‘Home’, is often thought to be about a girl named Wendy. However, this is just West slurring the word ‘Windy’ as Chicago is known as “The Windy City.”
The 2007 Graduation track features Coldplay’s lead singer Chris Martin. Kanye unveiled that he met Martin at Abbey Road Studios in London while he was working on the theme song for the movie Mission: Impossible 3. Chris Martin was in a neighbouring studio and they met up during a break to jam and decided to record ‘Homecoming’.
The music video was directed by the legendary videographer, Hype Williams and was shot in Chicago. The video also features a cameo from Chicago native and longtime Kanye collaborator Common.