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Kanye West Cover Story For Complex (Dec/Jan 2010)

March 18th, 2011 | Feature Style, Things I Wrote | ncb | No Comments

Project Runaway

In the space of six months, Complex editor-in-chief Noah Callahan-Bever confided in Kanye, flew to Hawaii, and found himself in rap nerd Nirvana.

“Did you look at my eyes?” asked Kanye West over the phone. He was calling from Milan. It was the middle of October 2009. It had been over a year since the completion of his last LP, 808s & Heartbreak, but this conversation was my first glimpse of what would become My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “I mean, really look in my eyes in the ‘Run This Town’ video. If you do, you can’t tell me you’re surprised by what happened. It was all there in my eyes.”

Kanye West Feature for Mass Appeal (September 2002)

November 22nd, 2010 | Feature Style, Things I Wrote | ncb | No Comments

Soul By The Pound

Kanye West brought the soul back to hip hop beats, but just wait ‘til you hear what his rhymes bring back. By Noah Callahan-Bever.

Kanye West is a confident guy. Supremely confident. If you want to be a jerk about it, you might even call him gassed. He says things like, “If you think about it, I’ve produced the most classic albums of the century.” Which, strictly speaking, is true. He had the most beats on Jay-Z’s The Blueprint [Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, ‘01] and Scarface’s The Fix [Def Jam], both judged to be classic by many, including…gulp…The Source.

Clipse Feature for XXL (August 2002)

November 17th, 2010 | Feature Style, Things I Wrote | ncb | No Comments

Way of Life

They’re two hustlers, baby! And they want you to know, it ain’t where they been but where they’re about to go. Pharrell’s prized pupils, CLIPSE are the leaders of the new school. By Noah Callahan-Bever.

Though Malice, the older of the two Clipse brothers, may laugh at the suggestion, it’s clearly true. If one were to reduce the content of the duo’s surprisingly mature and sonically sophisticated new album, Lord Willin’, to one essential sentence, it most surely would be: “I lived off cocaine, way before I lived off rap.”

50 Cent Feature for BLAZE (June 2000)

November 9th, 2010 | Feature Style, Things I Wrote | ncb | 1 Comment

Change-N-The-Game

50 Cent goes for broke with his debut, Power of the Dollar. Noah Callahan-Bever counts the change.

“He’s dead,” says rapper 50 Cent, as his finger darts across a creased photo. The wrinkled relic—which an old friend recently found and shoved quite unexpectedly into his hand here on the corner of Guy R. Brewer Boulevard while 50 is giving a tour of his Jamaica, Queens haunts—depicts a semicircle of grown men dressed in tuxedos, with champagne glasses raised in a toast. In the middle of this Godfather-esque image is the beaming face of 50 Cent. He looks to be about 17. But in a weird way, due to his confident smile and relaxed body language, the man-child fits into the scene more than he doesn’t. 50 continues, revealing the desperate fates that those in the photo succumbed to. “Him, too. That nigga in jail. He on the run.” He chuckles, “I don’t even know what happened to that nigga!”