Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. There's a new three-part

documentary about Kanya West called Genius. It hits Netflix February 16.

So what's really special about this documentary is that the filmmakers had access to

Kanye starting in 2002 or so.

You see Kanye before he even signed his deal with Def Jam and the access goes all the way up to almost the present day.

So it's definitely the most intimate look we've had at Yay in his entire career.

Obviously he's been a controversial figure. I think it really

humanizes him. You see footage of him with his late mother Donda that stuff we've

never seen before you really start to understand that relationship and there's a ton more.

In a little bit I'm going to bring on the directors, Kudi and Chique, to talk about the process

behind the film as well as Yea's recent request to have final cut of it,

which they turned down.

But first, I want to bring on Rolling Stone's own film

expert, David Fear, to talk a little bit about Genius

and put it in some context.

It is interesting just more broadly that the streaming era is leading towards these longer, specifically music documentaries.

It doesn't seem a coincidence that we got the longest Beatles documentary ever made.

Well, maybe Beatles anthology was longer, but you know what I mean.

A very long Beatles documentary mean a very long Beatles documentary do you

think it's mostly for the good or do you think that we're losing that discipline of getting

it down to two hours as much as I have a couple of issues with genius, I think it sort of needs to be a three-part,

what is it like close to seven hours, I believe? It sort of needs that length, it needs that space.

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