#THE GO GETTERS HOW TO#

“I have an uncle named Roc, Vernardo Parker,” he explains. But first, they needed a new name since another group had been using Chicago Outfit first. John Monopoly was the one who came up with the name that stuck. He had more of a vision and he was more focused than any of us, even as a kid.”Īfter Donda’s house, the group moved to their home away from home, Craig Bauer’s Hinge Studios. “When I got introduced to Kanye’s room, it was crates of records everywhere. “In my bedroom, I had the typical posters of Ferraris and girls in bikinis on the wall,” he says. It was that same house, Doe recalls, that gave him a clue just how focused his new groupmate was. West gave us an outlet to create music in her home in the suburbs.” “We came from the South Side and we was a little less privileged than Kanye growing up,” Doe remembers. The group frequently worked out of Donda West’s home. L-R: John Legend, Kanye West, Craig Bauer. Go Getters was a crew, and Doe was definitely part of the crew.” He had the potential to rap, but at that time he was in the early stages of really trying to get it together. Really Doe was a guy who lived around the corner from me.

#THE GO GETTERS HOW TO#

Arrowstar was the dude that Kanye credits with teaching him how to rap. “I snatched up Arrowstar, because he was cold as shit. “I snatched up my little homie from down the street at the time by the name of Timmy G,” he recalls. GLC knew just who to get to fill out the lineup of the group, which was known as the Chicago Outfit at the time. Kanye was doing his solo thing, and then we decided we should come together and do the group.” “Kanye was like, ‘You need to go solo,’” he says. GLC recalls Kanye reaching out with a very particular request. Andre, a rapper and producer named Arrowstar, and Kanye all knew each other from grammar school. Prior to the group’s formation in 1996, GLC was part of a duo with a friend named Andre, who everyone called Birdman (“He kind of looked like a bird,” GLC helpfully explains). Kanye and company didn’t have to look far to find other members.

“I quit making beats nine months after meeting Kanye West because he was so good and it was like, why am I even doing this?” Monopoly recalls with a laugh. After being introduced by a mutual friend, the pair admired each other’s beatmaking skills and formed a short-lived production company. The beginnings of the group can be traced back to the day Kanye met Monopoly in 1990, when they were each in their early teens.

They were orbited by an extended crew of characters familiar to any Kanye fan, from collaborators like Really Doe, Malik Yusef, and Rhymefest, to the group’s managers: cousins Don C and John Monopoly. The Go Getters were a Chicago rap group in the mid-to-late ’90s, consisting of a young Kanye West alongside GLC, Timmy G, and Arrowstar. Other listeners who voraciously read through credits might have noticed that he produced multiple tracks on JAY-Z’s 2001 classic, The Blueprint, or even the Hov ballad “This Can’t Be Life” from the year prior.īut years before Kanye became a rising star in music and a go getter in several industries, he was actually a Go Getter. Many of us were introduced to him as the guy who rapped through a wired jaw on “Through the Wire” in 2003. When was the first time you heard of Kanye West?

The go getters