Coodie and Chike believe in the power of love. The response to their work jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy has been uniformly positive and even rapturous in a way that is striking, considering how unwieldy and polarizing their subject is. That feedback is a testament, they say, to the force of love, force and to creating something out of pure and positive intent.
Then again, when I speak to them over Zoom recently, only the first two acts of the trilogy have been released, treading the ground that comes before the waves of controversy that West’s two-decade stardom have been defined by. The first two parts have been praised for their raw, visceral, at times tragic footage of a young Ye leading up to his debut album The College Dropout, when Coodie first began following the promising producer in Chicago in the early 2000s. But the trilogy’s most uneven and tricky section comes in act iii: Awakening, the section that all viewers know is coming and will at times want to turn away from the most.
