Jamie Foxx is a prominent figure in Hollywood and is a versatile performer. From movies to music and television, Foxx can sing, rap, act and do stand-up comedy. However, like many in the industry, when Kanye West first approached him as an aspiring rapper, Foxx wasn’t sure he would succeed.
In 2005, a documentary named VH1 Driven: Kanye West saw a young Jay-Z and Dame Dash express how they were not keen on signing Kanye West as an artist in 2002 and admitted they did not see a career for him as an emcee.
Foxx held the same opinion. In 2002, while recording his debut album, College Dropout, Kanye met Foxx shortly after his car accident. At this point, Ye was focusing on his second single, ‘Slow Jamz.’
Last year, during an appearance on the Rap Radar podcast with Elliot Wilson and Brian ‘B.Bot’ Miller, Foxx recalled the day he first met Kanye and how he thought ‘Slow Jamz’ would flop after recording it.
Detailing how he met the Chicago legend, Foxx told the hosts, “My boy Breyon brings this kid in, with his jaw busted, has a backpack on. I said, ‘Who’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s Kanye’. I said, ‘What is a Kanye?’, cause you know it was strange. He said, ‘Well, he’s a producer, but he also raps. He’s about to be the one’. I said okay. So I go up to him, and I said, ‘When people come to my house, they got to perform.”
He then proceeded to explain how West performed for him, recalling, “The motherf**ker performs some sh*t that was so incredible, and then he goes, ‘I got a song that I think you’ll be good on’. We go in the studio, and he said the song goes, ‘She said she want some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross’. [I Said] ‘Okay, young fellow, I got it, let me sing it for you. She said she want some Maaaaaarvin’, and he was like, ‘Uh, don’t do that.’”
He continued, “He went from that smile to the frown, you know who he be like. I’m thinking he ain’t gonna make it, this song is whack right?! I go do a bad movie for like 12 weeks. It’s number 1 in the country. That’s how the music was birthed. So it came out of something organic, it was a hit song so that opened the door for me to then, further go on and, you know, do other things.”
Kanye and Foxx then worked on other music, including West’s 2005 hit ‘Gold Digger’, and ever since, the pair have made magic. You can listen to Foxx’s Rap Radar interview below.
