Whether we like the fact that Kanye West and Jay-Z performed their main hit Ni**as in Paris 10 times during their last show in LA on the WTT tour or not, we are overall fans of the tour itself!

Both Christian and myself experienced their show in Madison Square Garden, NY, and it has been really interesting to follow all the hype around the tour on blogs and magazine websites afterwards.

Now, there is a backside to the gold medal, which Hov and Mr. West of course are aware of themselves. It’s not all about glamour, models, sold out concerts and limited kicks; It’s mostly about hard f*cking work!
For that reason Kanye West gave the VoyR crew permission to do a short “behind the scenes” documentary series for fans to watch, and for fans to understand the amount of work himself and Jay-Z are actually putting into this. The first episode came out about a week ago, the second one two days ago.

The episodes are originally only on voyr.com, where you can sign up and get to watch the episodes in high quality. If you’re not a fan of that check out the first episode right here;

Now, the next episode is a little more personal than the first one. In episode two we are taken back to chi-town (Chicago, if any doubts), to see where Kanye grew up, check it out;

The next three episode are less about Kanye and Jay, but more are about the people around them. We are introduced to friends, managers and creative directors. You might have heard of some of them before, since they are doing interesting stuff as for example Don C, who’s out with the famous Just Don snakeskin snapbacks;

In episode 6 VoyR is back on Kanye. In this episode we get more behind the scenes footage of them working, but also some footage from Ibn Jasper’s birthday party, which is quite interesting. People like John Legend, Big Sean, James Blake, Mannie Fresh and Mary Kate & Ashley are in this episode as well.

For people who is generally fans of the two living legends, and especially for people who have “watched the throne” this documentary series is actually pretty touching, or at least it is to me, since it’s bringing back some great memories. Seeing them struggle to put on a good show for their audience is something I very much like to see. The amount of effort they’re putting into it is big and which makes me appreciate what I experienced even more!

Already from the very beginning and reveal of the WTT album they started doing stuff to make sure everybody was aware of it. Not only did they advertise their coming album on several major websites, they made a whole big a deal around the release of the album in a modern (digital) way.

On July 4th of this year, it was for the first time available for pre-order on Jay’s Life + Times website. On July 7th Jay-Z then hosted a private listening session on the Mercer Hotel in New York, for not only journalists, music reporters and some other hand-picked people, but also for the two first people to pre-order the CD on Life + Times (to lucky a$$ teenage kids). At the session he basically just played the album through on his MacBook Pro.

On July 22nd the iTunes store was almost completely redesigned with the WTT album cover look designed by Riccardo Tisci, and the album was now available for digital pre-order.

On August 1st Jay and Kanye then held a real listening session at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York’s American Museum of Natural History. This session included several other artists, models and of course more journalists!

The album first became available digitally on iTunes on August 8th, which created a lot of attention, from our side as well, since the hard cover version weren’t available until August 12th.

Last but not least, they also announced the WTT Tour, which started in Atlanta on October 29th.

From the very first show in Atlanta there has been a great buzz around the tour, especially after they performed Ni**as in Paris not just one, but three times (at that time it was “cray”). I was going to the New York show, which was next after the ATL one and I was only dreaming that they would do something like that in NY as well; they did. Ever since they have actually managed to keep a hype around the tour by performing the song more and more times, which is crazy strategy, but since people like us are still writing about it, it’s obviously working.

Now, I’m not going to argue whether the newest number (10 times) is to many or not, but I am going to show you this;

A Jay album, a Kanye album and another WTT album… looks like they’ll be thronin’ like crazy next year as well!

Emil