It’s the great conundrum that plagues the greats that are fortunate enough and talented enough to craft a body of work that is instantly considered a classic: Now what? For Kanye West, the answer apparently was make something even better. Late Registration, (2005) Getty Images/Def Jam But The College Dropout is the album that gives us the patience to let him go ahead and fix “Wolves.” Kanye’s debut is the reminder we need of the greatness that West is capable of when he has the drive to see a project all the way through.– Alex Galbraith It can be hard to remember this Yeezy, given that he doesn’t even finish albums before releasing them nowadays. Kanye West faced down the idea of never getting to make an artistic statement of his own, so he came back with the single most solid work he’s ever produced. Taken together, they make Kanye West’s most complete album, with his greatest ratio of incredible songs to misses. But the album also featured tracks that took on low-wage labor (“Spaceship”), college and the job market (“All Falls Down” and “School Spirit”), the backpack and luxury rap dichotomy (“Breathe In, Breathe Out”) and female body image (“The New Workout Plan”). Kanye covered a huge swath of topics over the course of the album’s 15 songs and six skits. We were years out from “The Glory” but Kanye West had no idea if he’d ever get the chance to talk his sh*t again, so he threw every idea he had up to that point into Dropout. But to do all that and nod toward backpacker-y and Polo shirts while the rap mainstream was still infatuated with badman tales and menacing cuts full of knuckleheadery is the sort of pig in a poke purchase that only someone who’s completely uncertain of their future can make. Wagering most of your debut album on your own production style of sped-up R&B samples is a risk. Sampling a choir to rap about the devil and God battling for your soul would be a gamble. Rap has gone through at least three major stylistic shifts since then - mostly fronted by Kanye West, but we’ll get to that - and the success of a single like “Jesus Walks” or “All Falls Down” can lead us to forget how strange all of this was in 2004. The College Dropout might sound tame or innocent when viewed through the lens of 2017. So, he littered his debut with gospel songs and rapped like his hair was alight (but would not burn up). He’d be the guy responsible for most of the sounds on one of the greatest rap albums ever released, but how many people would actually know his name outside of forums for the trivia and gear-obsessed? The crash put the fear of God into Kanye West, a vengeful and all-powerful one that he still saw as separate from himself. If he’d died right then, he’d go down as a footnote for his fellow rap nerds. West can be forgiven for self-mythologizing on the track because the accident forced him to take stock of his own life. West nearly died at the tail end of 2002, falling asleep at the wheel of a rented Lexus and waking up in “the same hospital where Biggie Smalls died” with his jaw run through with wiring. Who else has the audacity to close something as uncertain as a rap album from a nerdy studio rat with a heaping plate of shit to eat for anyone who dares to stand between them and the fame they feel they are owed?īut put yourself in Kanye’s shoes and “Last Call” begins to make quite a bit of sense. What other artist in history has closed their debut album with a thirteen-minute track talking about everything they have already done. ‘Ye had waited his entire life to finally get put on with a major-label rap project and - given that sense of always deserving better that’s colored his entire career - he wouldn’t let us forget it. But even if Kanye West’s audience for The College Dropout was unfamiliar with that idea, they’d certainly learn it by the end of the album. The College Dropout, (2004) Getty Images/Def JamĪ famous adage tells us that you have your entire life to write your first album. Instead, here is a fan of each record, defending their beloved choice as the one that should rank above all the rest an argument for every single one of Kanye West’s albums as his best. So, it occurred to us that those arguments are preferable to putting these records in any sort of arbitrary order. But like clockwork, every time these rankings pop up, factions rise up to defend every single album that Yeezy ever touched as his best. The internet loves to rank things, and it seems Kanye West’s album discography has been ranked, re-ranked, and analyzed more times than any of us can count.
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