Kanye West first made his way onto the scene in the early 2000s as one of Hip Hop’s best young producers & everything from there on is history. Now an early beat tape from Kanye in 2001 has surfaced on YouTube which puts on display some of the great work he had done at a young age. Take a listen below:

UPDATE: So it turns out that, yes, these are in fact old beats from a young Kanye, but not as old as we thought.  The tape was originally put together by Nathan Slavik & Jensen Karp under the title The Hype Men Present: Kanye West’s First Beats (Disc 1) after Jensen re-discovered a CD full of beats that Kanye had once slipped him. The two released the beat tape on December 23 of 2011 and it was overlooked for quite some time until a few days ago someone uploaded the tape to YouTube and it caught fire on Reddit. Fast forward almost 5 years later and the rest of the world has finally caught on. Listen to The Hype Men Present: Kanye West’s First Beats (Disc 1) below: