9th Wonder recently sat down with HipHopDX where he spoke about a plethora of topics, including his long friendship with Kanye West. The famed producer remembers meeting Kanye at the Southeastern Music Conference in North Carolina around the early 2000s and listening to "The College Dropout" before it was released. 

"Man our history with Kanye West is when he came to North Carolina and met us at the Southeastern Music Conference. He met us down there and he was like, 'I know who y'all are.' We didn't know that Young Guru was playing The Listening all year prior to June of 2003. That's when we met Kanye West and he played us what he had done from The College Dropout. And he was saying that the label wasn't really behind it and he really wanted to do some things with it. He thought it was gonna be a big album and we're sitting there like, 'Yeah the songs are dope. We don't understand what the problem is.'" 

9th Wonder also spoke about Kanye beating his group Little Brother to the punch in terms of branding his image, which took the Chicago rapper's career to the next level. 

"I think that Kanye really tapped into something that we didn't: Branding. We didn't know what branding was. Us musicians think that just the music is going to carry us—the beats and the rhymes. Well yeah, that's to a certain point. If you want to get past a certain point it has to be more than just your beats or raps. You have to have something about you. For Kanye it was his branding. It's branding, he had the music, he had the rhymes, but he had the Dropout Bear. We didn't have the Dropout Bear. That became his. It even made him prevalent for having the cover with him that had the bear head off. Then the next album, in Late Registration, you don't see him in the artwork at all. You just see the bear. Then Graduation, same thing. So he created this persona, this brand that we just didn't have. He just tapped into that and it was off to the races. So yeah, he did beat us to the punch." 

During the interview, the North Carolina native also spoke about doing a sequel to "Death of a Pop Star" with David Banner, his relationship with DJ Drama, Little Brother's third album, and more.

Click through the above slide to view clips of the full interview.

Source: HipHopDX