The intimacy of a home movie is unreplicable and, viewed in retrospect, home movies are as telling as any diary entry. (This is why they are used as an easy flashback device for so many movies about dramatic familial interchange and/or horrors.) They’re a microscope where the nuances of boring, day-to-day living become blown up and symbolic. This clip of Kanye West and his mother Donda at the beginning of his career as a rapper is exactly that, a peek into the fundamentals of how much they loved each other, how supportive she was, how close they were. It’s lovely and heartbreaking. (Donda West died in 2007 due to complications from plastic surgery and a pre-existing heart condition.)
As FACT notes, the first half of this video was previously released, but bears another watch—Donda, sweetly, recalls almost every word of Kanye’s very first rap, and reminds him that whenever he’d rap it she’d encourage him: “Remember everything you would do, I’d say, ‘That’s a million dollars.” Ye was young then, of course—”Hey Mama” was on his 2005 album Late Registration, and this appears to be around then based on his fade and that striped sweater—but in her presence, he’s got a silent, attendant humility, sweet and small and hanging on her every word. In the new footage, they rap “Hey Mama” together, his arm draped around her, her pride beaming.
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