Ye Emerges At Center Of Director Coodie’s Stunning 3,000-Hour Hip-Hop Vault

Ye could soon have hundreds of hours of unseen history hitting the internet as “Jeen-Yuhs” director Coodie Simmons prepares to open a massive archive documenting Hip-Hop and Chicago culture across decades.

Coodie says his collection includes 546 hours connected to Ye as part of more than 3,000 hours of archival material he plans to make available through his website. The larger collection reaches well beyond the superstar rapper and reportedly covers Hip-Hop, lifestyle, fashion and Chicago culture from the 1990s through the present.

If those numbers hold, Coodie has quite a vault.

Three thousand hours translates to 125 straight days of footage. More importantly, the collection potentially captures people, places and cultural moments that existed before smartphones turned nearly everyone into a walking camera crew.

Coodie was doing it when carrying a camera around was work.

There is one distinction AllHipHop has confirmed and Coodie gave the real deal.

“We’re not dropping all the footage at once,” he said laughing. “We’re relaunching Creativecontrol.tv . But we do have 3000 hour or more of footage.”

The Chicago filmmaker eventually became globally known worldwide through “Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” the 2022 Netflix documentary directed by Coodie and film partner Chike Ozah. The three-part project followed Ye from an ambitious Chicago producer trying to become a respected rapper through his rise into one of music’s biggest stars. The pair also had years of time in New York City, making their bones in the local scene.

Netflix previously declared the filmmakers worked with hundreds of hours of footage while constructing the nearly five-hour documentary.

Clearly, viewers only saw a fraction of what Coodie had captured.

His latest announcement arrives at an especially interesting moment for Ye watchers.

Coodie recently shared previously unseen footage showing Ye and Kid Cudi working on “Ghost Town,” offering a rare look inside the creative process behind the celebrated 2018 collaboration. The clip surfaced shortly after Ye and Cudi reunited onstage at Soldier Field in Chicago.

The longtime collaborators performed “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1” and “Ghost Town” during the Chicago reunion. Cudi also performed “Pursuit of Happiness.” Their appearance carried extra weight because their friendship had publicly fractured years earlier.

Coodie’s camera was documenting Chicago and Hip-Hop before Kanye became Ye. His work grew from the local television program Channel Zero and eventually put him in position to capture an aspiring Kanye West before the record deals, stadium concerts and worldwide celebrity.

“Jeen-Yuhs” showed what could happen when selected several hours from years of recordings and shaped them into a story. The vault could reverse that process by allowing people to see other archives that have never made the final cuts.