Now I Ain’t Saying He’s a Crate Digger: Kanye West, “Community Theaters” and the Soul Archive

Abstract

Kanye West’s first collaboration with Jay Z on The Dynasty: Roc La Familia (2000) gave an early inkling on what would be the producer’s contribution to the sonic excavation of the Soul music tradition of the late 1960s and 1970s. The track “This Can’t be Life” features Beanie Sigel and Scarface (whose The Fixx, West would later contribute production), and is based on a sample from Harold Melvin and the Bluenote’s “I Miss You.” Though the song is not significant within the larger scope of West’s career, it placed Jay Z in a distinctly soulful context that would form the basis of the rapper’s career-defining The Blueprint (2001) as well as frame the early stages of West’s own solo career. At the foundation of West’s music prior to the release of his 2007 recording Graduation is recovery of the aesthetic possibilities of Soul music—a broadly conceived attempt to elevate Soul music as a classical American form, rooted in what Guthrie Ramsey Jr. calls the “community theaters” of Black life.¹ Additionally, West’s attention to the Soul archive was also a method to balance his status as one of the most recognizable mainstream rap producers—a legitimate Pop star—with his creative devotion to laboring as a “Crate Digger,” as evidenced by famous lyrics that reference long periods of seclusion and a Cosby show reference to living in a different world.