Kanye West had a problem as an adolescent with his disciplinarian mom. In “Raising Kanye,” a new memoir of the hip-hop star’s youth in Chicago, Donda West says she repeatedly punished her son for his interest in raunchy adult magazines and videos, which began in fifth grade. “I’ll never forget the day he took the X-rated magazine to school [and] was passing it around for the other boys to see and the teacher caught him,” writes Donda, who chairs the Chicago State University English Dept. “When she asked him where he’d gotten the magazine, he said, ‘From my mother’s closet!’ . . . Before I knew it, I’d lost my temper and smacked him across the face.” After Kanye entered high school, Donda one day borrowed his VCR to watch a movie – and discovered an ultra-hard-core porn tape inside. “It was triple-X-rated and I was mad as hell.” To punish Kanye, she “required him to do a full-blown research paper complete with footnotes and bibliography . . . ‘The Impact of Watching X-rated Movies on a Teen-age Boy’ . . . Until he finished the paper to my satisfaction, there was to be no television, no going to play basketball, no friends over.”
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One Response to “Kanye West Was A Dirty Little Boy”
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It’s sad that you would characterize Kanye as “a dirty little boy”. Of all the things I said in the book, you chose to focus on the x-rated incidents (all two of them) rather than on Kanye writing raps from age eight, his perseverance to reach his goals in music, his love for his family, his exposure and sensitivity to different cultures throughout his life, his talent as an artist from a very young age, etc. etc. etc. I could write another book about irresponsible journalism, about those who frame contexts that distort the whole picture for the sake of creating a sensational headline. I didn’t expect any less. But it’s still sad. Kanye was not a dirty little boy. If he was, there should be more like him. Look who they turn out to be.