![]() Many innovations that would take precedence in West’s later career first entered circulation on Graduation. Takashi Murakami’s album art announced that Kanye had set out to craft a star-making LP by seeking alien spaces, and its successes feel momentous as landing on another planet: be it Daft Punk’s electronica, T-Pain’s Auto-Tune, or Young Jeezy’s ad-libs, Kanye expanded his celestial empire to include them all. One-third of the album is disposable, but the remaining tracks stand out all the brighter against their dimness. It’s remarkable, given the disorientation described and embodied on Graduation, how marvelous the album sounds regardless. No one could tell him anything, but he wasn’t sure what he had left to say. Kanye was alone and a star, but he didn’t much sound like he enjoyed it. But how far up could one go after touching the sky? Graduation is inferior to its predecessors in the same way that being a champion is less gratifying than the process of competing itself. Kanye’s brand is and will always be uplift: be it spiritual, financial, social, or cultural, the man seems not to believe in his own existence unless he’s rising. Now he was no longer a student among other students, but a lone graduate facing an uncertain future with a confused vision. On College Dropout and Late Registration he had kept himself to wry commentary from a collective source. No one works with Coldplay unless they’re interested in making pop music, and Graduation is the first Kanye album to take the artifices of pop stardom for its material. He then walks it back a bit by adding, “Should have talked you like a man, should have told you first,” but the fact that he was discussing this publicly at all was a harbinger that the Ye-Z partnership would be unstable at best. As a result, listeners were subjected to an anomalous Chris Martin hook, the incredibly dull repetitions of “Drunk and Hot Girls,” and an album closer (“Big Brother”) where Kanye, after a couple reverent verses dedicated to Graduation executive producer, Roc-A-Fella label head and big-brother figure Jay-Z, passive-aggressively complained about Jay-Z stealing his idea of a Coldplay feature for himself. ![]() He was prepared to venture into any territory, so long as it wasn’t familiar. After two albums (really, one masterpiece done twice over) drawing on rich samples from his native heritage of black gospel, soul, and R&B, Kanye seemed determined to change things, to introduce a higher level of chance and error into his creation. ![]() The flow between songs is interrupted by variances in production: Instead of the unified, mural-like soundscape of The College Dropout and Late Registration, the impression left by Graduation is more of a collage. Graduation marks the first work from the artist that isn’t entirely cohesive. In keeping with its title, Kanye’s third album puts on a weird costume and participates in a ceremonious procession, but behind the ordered facade something disheveled invariably peeps through. Graduation, which turns ten today, probably isn’t the worst Kanye West LP, but even if it were, that would hardly be cause for shame. ![]()
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