“Too many cooks”: The reason Kanye West split with his producer after ‘Graduation’
Kanye West worked extensively with DJ Toomp on his Graduation album. The Atlanta producer had a hand in three of the biggest tracks on the album, ‘Good Life’, ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ and ‘Big Brother’, but the pair haven’t collaborated since.
As Ye has progressed through his albums over the years, he’s gradually started working with more producers on his songs. While The College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation and 808s & Heartbreak stuck to a tight personnel, albums after My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy included substantially more producers.
According to Toomp, that was the reason they no longer worked together past 2007. “Ye started working a different way after that,” he said on My Expert Opinion. “He started really wanting to have a lot of cooks in the kitchen, you know, working on one meal type of shit it’d be different if you say, ‘Alright, we’ll bring these cats in. We’re gonna do an Italian cuisine. Okay, this day we’re gonna do a Jamaican cuisine. Oh, we’re gonna do Mexican cuisine.’
“But it was just so many different — you know how you walk through the mall and food court and you might get sick because you got the wings over here and the Chick-fil-A and all them scents hit. It was just too many cooks in the kitchen.”
Graduation debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, selling over 957,000 copies in its first week. Toomp produced ‘Big Brother’ on his own while co-producing ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ with Kanye and ‘Good Life‘ with Ye and Mike Dean. Kanye later brought him into sessions for his 2010 album, but nothing materialised.
“I was in Hawaii for the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album,” he said. “It was me, No ID, [Rick] Ross was out there, Pusha [T], and that’s when he was dating Amber [Rose] back then. I worked on ‘All of the Lights’, which had big crazy horns. I had my drums on there, but I woke up the next day and my joint wasn’t there. It was like a whole other beat.”
Of course, he understood that evolution had to happen: “I know things change, but I think when you start producing like that, the whole sound change. They even took away from what [Ye] did from what he does to a certain extent, right, because even with ‘Good Life’ he started off playing with the Michael Jackson sample, and I tweaked it in and tuned it up to the ‘P.Y.T.’ key so we could really make it a song. So it’s like that collaborative effort made more sense.”
Toomp has been outspoken about Kanye over the years. Following a listening session for Donda at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in 2021, the producer said he knew it wouldn’t be ready for release the following day.
“Just as a producer, as a music guy, as a guy who really loves hip-hop, hip-hop is derived from drums, as far as us,” he told B High ATL. “We send signals across a whole ocean with drums. That’s our shit, the beat. That’s the rhythm. And when I heard a lot of the songs that just didn’t have drums, I thought it was about to drop and he start talkin’. I’m like, ‘Damn, that’s it? Is that the song?’”
He continued, “[Donda] sound like that could be dope. If I was in the studio with ‘Ye, I’d say, ‘Is this shit gonna drop anywhere? ‘Cause you build us up and we thinkin’ that shit finna go crazy, but right when you think a beat’s gonna drop, that shit go to another song.’ And that’s why I was like, ‘Ah, this album must not be finished.’”