Teenaged Kanye West Shouts Out Alanis Morissette In 1996 Freestyle: Watch

Christina Lee | July 18, 2014 9:06 am

A 19-year-old Kanye West calls out no-name rappers in an unearthed freestyle from 1996. One of the most memorable lines is “this shit is mad ironic, like Alanis Morissette,” because the mental image of Yeezus listening to that song, if not the entirety of 1995’s Jagged Little Pill is too great. (It was one of the biggest albums of that decade.) The reference also helps emphasize how confident West already was at the time, even though he wasn’t rapping with a hard “HAH” just yet.

West had flown in from Chicago to the newly-opened New York location of record store Fat Beats. (The store closed in 2010.) Its former general manager, DJ Eclipse, had found the footage while converting old Hi8 video tapes to DVDs, before he uploaded the clip and sent it to Complex.

“Now we had a lot of the usual suspects in the place that day,” DJ Eclipse said, adding, “But what took me by surprise was the appearance of this 19-year-old kid who at that time nobody knew. At least in NYC.”

Dissing no-name rappers, while being a no-name rapper himself — now that’s mad ironic. Watch the freestyle below.

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