Got Your Mos Def Introducing Vintage Kanye West Performing in Def Poetry Right Here

New York Magazine's Vulture points us to something pretty great: a young, "pre-fame" Kanye West performing in HBO's Def Poetry in 2004, though a commenter dates it "[v]intage TWO THOUSAND AND THREE shit." Mos Def is there as well, introducing Kanye as "the future of hip-hop." (No kidding.) "Before he was at the forefront of the nascent luxury-rap scene, 'Ye was hitting up poetry slams and wearing sensibly layered shirts," writes NY Mag.

In a thorough look at Kanye's fourth album, 808s, The Awl was watching this video too. In it, Kanye "recite[s] lyrics from the first and second verses of the song “All Falls Down,” only here, the form was a spoken word piece named “Self Conscious.” Emma Carmichael continues:

I’ve learned, since I discovered it a few years back, that I can watch this clip many times and never get tired of it. Part of the wonder is merely in observing someone who’s earned the carefully rationed “global superstar” title when he was a relative unknown. It was only shot about seven years ago, after all. But the real draw is that it’s a total recontextualization of a song to which I now know every single word. There’s no beat, of course, and no effect to his voice, either, save for Kanye’s exaggerated nervousness at the beginning. He takes more time to recite his words, pausing for emphasis or relief, and at one point—the 1:50 mark in the clip—he cuts his own rhythm with a faint aside. No one in the audience can interrupt, because no one knows what he will say next.

A few years ago, I sat in a living room next to a very drunk young man who was, along with many of the other young drunk people in the room, shouting the lyrics to “All Falls Down.” When he reached the middle of the third verse, he yelled out the line, “Drug dealer buy Jordans, crack head buy crack/And a white man get paid off of all of that,” and then he turned to me and said, laughing self-consciously, “I always feel so bad when I rap that part.”

In his Def Poetry performance, Kanye ended on the line that always made that particular white person feel very bad. He smiled out at the crowd in a kind of bashful pleasure, letting them hear what he’d said for a moment, and then left the stage. But on the radio version of “All Falls Down,” the line is edited out, so that we only hear, “— —- —- —-, crack head buy crack/And a —- man get paid off of all of that.”

808s has a lot in common with that Def Jam performance. It’s imperfect, totally raw and an absolute departure from what we think we know about an artist. The album was not great, but it was daring: It took hip hop’s confessional, twisted it into something overwrought and unrecognizable, and left it on the table to see what would happen next. Like the Maybach in the “Otis” video, he mangled a form to which he’d made us accustomed.

Watch Def Poetry-era Kanye below.