Enthralling and unusual – even if you don’t care about Kanye: Netflix’s Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy reviewed

The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music critic I saw an awful lot – was Kanye West at Glastonbury in 2015. Perhaps he was making some kind of ironic statement on the nature of celebrity and fan expectation: blinding lights all focused on himself; no attempts to engage with the crowd; relentless, mechanical rapping but with most of the amusing samples and catchy hooks removed, the better to punish us all by ordeal with loud, righteous verbiage.

But I still admire this irritating genius hugely because besides making often very addictive albums he refuses to play the game – publicly insulting the (supposedly) most squeaky clean star in the industry Taylor Swift, making nice (at least for a period) with President Trump, preferring to rap eloquently about quotidian experience (e.g. breaking his jaw in a serious car accident) rather than about the usual gangster fodder of gats and hos.

It was because of the last that he almost never made it as a major star. His record label Roc-A- Fella recognised his massive talents as a producer furnishing better known artistes such as Ludacris and Scarface with beats. But it was never much interested in helping him with his ambition to become a rap star in his own right. He had no criminal past; he wasn’t especially into guns or violence; his rhymes and word play (mum, Donda, was an English professor) were almost overwhelmingly sophisticated, his delivery unmacho, and his breathing technique slightly odd.

This is one of the things that makes Netflix’s three-part documentary Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy so enthralling and unusual. It shows a rare glimpse of an incredibly famous pop star before he becomes incredibly famous – when it still seems up in the air as to whether he is going to make it or not.