Kanye West Flashes Back to His Youth on 'Mama's Boyfriend'

Kanye West performs in Rabat, Morocco, May 21, 2011.

ABDELHAK SENNA/AFP/Getty Images

A seemingly finished version of Kanye West's song "Mama's Boyfriend" leaked to the internet yesterday. Though it's unclear how the track will be officially released, this recording is a classic Kanye production, complete with a crisp beat and a pitched-up soul sample. The song, which finds the rapper looking back on the guys who tried to date his mother Donda West back when she was raising him on her own, has been circulating in various forms for a while now, mainly due to West dropping verses from the song in live performances.

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In fact, back when West stopped by Rolling Stone's office last year, he rapped "Mama's Boyfriend" in our conference room. Kanye wouldn't allow us to film his performance – but you can check out some video footage of West's visit in which he explained how he's motivated by excitement and lamented that so much great music ends up being obscure because some artists don't want to engage with mainstream culture.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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