kanye west - college dropout

I wonder if my kids will know Kanye West even made music.

Even today, it's a commonly overlooked fact that he used to make brilliant rap albums. It's hard to feel bad for him, since it is his own fault he's a total jackass, but at the same, it's very easy to feel bad for the music.

There isn't a single bad track on College Dropout. Not even a mediocre one. Hell, even the skits fit into the overall theme remarkably well. At times it's stunningly personal, at others it's the same "Hey look at me I rap real good" MC nonsense, and at others it's a borderline gospel album. Singles like "Jesus Walks," "All Falls Down," and "The New Workout Plan" play beautifully against deeper cuts like "Spaceship" and "Two Words," flowing brilliantly from beginning to end. It's a hip-hop album that has a soul, one that manages to make even the most blatant singles undeniably original, a skill Kanye arguably brought back into the mainstream single-handedly.

This is a well rounded artistic statement from an artist now so deeply hated and ridiculed, South Park singled him out for an entire searing episode, christening him a "Gay Fish" in the eyes of a generation who, ironically, he proclaimed himself to be the voice of.

This is the same artist who can't lose a VMA without throwing a temper tantrum, the same artist who "wrote" an inspirational book made up mainly of clichéd sentiments and blank pages. If I played this album for my kids and told them it was by the same guy who interrupted Taylor Swift, they’d just laugh. And how could I blame them?

In this 2009 outlook, the album plays like a tragedy, almost completely opposite of Kanye's original vision.

The album at face value tells the story of a kid growing up in the ghetto, raised by his single mom, selling drugs to get along, fighting his way into college, only to be shunned by the people around him until he finally drops out, begins rapping, and is all of a sudden picked up by Jay-Z, who's now helping him record one of the greatest rap albums of the last decade.

In 2009, however, the album plays like an egotistical, immature rapper obsessed with fame revisiting his past, still making claims that he was shy, poor, and oppressed by the people around him, even though they're the farthest things from the truth. It's an album that simultaneously shows how far he's come, and how far he's fallen.

"A shorty [lookin'] up to the dopeman," rising from poverty to the point of superstardom, only to have it eat him alive, replacing it with a self-proclaimed "Voice of a Generation" who just can't get over how amazing he is.

College Dropout is a triumph and an embarrassment, a brilliant piece of hip-hop history that will follow Kanye to the grave, for better or worse, hopefully one day reminding future generations (and Kanye himself) that there was once a legitimate artist behind the ego.


Edited 6/7/2010