Kanye West worked as a producer for Jay-Z before releasing his own music. The Chicago rapper produced songs for the successful album Blueprint, but Jay-Z wasn’t sure West was ready to be a star in his own right. It took seeing how the album charted to realize West was right to pursue music.

Jay-Z said he wasn’t sure Kanye West should make an album

When West told Jay-Z and Damon Dash of Roc-A-Fella Records that he wanted to put out his own album, they weren’t sure if he should. While they admired his skill as a producer, they weren’t sure he had the style or background to make it. Eventually, though, they signed him, knowing that he was talented enough to make good music, even if it wasn’t commercially successful.

“We figured if we kept him close, at the very least we’d still have some hot beats,” Jay-Z told Rolling Stone.

In 2004, West released his debut studio album, College Dropout. It peaked at No. 2 on the US Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Album charts. This changed Jay-Z’s opinion of his new artist.

“It went from skepticism to excitement,” he said.

Jay-Z believed he was the first person to consider Kanye West a genius

Several years after the album’s release, Jay-Z said he was one of the first people to see West’s scope of talent.

“For me, [genius means] coming up with something so different and so full of emotion and truth,” he told Rolling Stone in 2007. “Kanye — I think I was the first to brand him a genius.”

Still, Jay-Z didn’t know that West was doing a perfect job of navigating fame.

“Some of the things he says, it’s un­necessary because of the level of suc­cess he’s attained,” he said. “But I know where he’s coming from. He’s fought all his life to tell people, ‘I’m great,’ so in his mind he’s still in that fight. He wants to be the best in the world.”

Their relationship hit a rough patch

While Jay-Z said he sees West as a brother, their relationship has not always been perfect. In a series of concerts, West railed against Jay-Z. Jay-Z also said he couldn’t support everything West did and said. Still, he said he would always love the other artist.

“I [talked to] Kanye the other day, just to tell him, like, he’s my brother,” he told The New York Times Style Magazine in 2017, adding, “I love Kanye. I do. It’s a complicated relationship with us.”

He also said there was a level of competition between them.

“Kanye came into this business on my label,” he said. “So I’ve always been like his big brother. And we’re both entertainers. It’s always been like a little underlying competition with your big brother. And we both love and respect each other’s art, too. So it’s like, we both — everyone wants to be the greatest in the world. You know what I’m saying? And then there’s like a lot of other factors that play in it. But it’s gonna, we gonna always be good.”