Kanye West avoids sophomore slump

Mike Newmark Asst. Arts Editor

Imagine—you’re an executive at Roc-A-Fella records, and your faithful, polo-shirted producer asks you if he can rap. What would you do? If you decided to laugh it off, you did what actual Roc-A-Fella execs did to Kanye West, a middle-class record producer nobody took seriously until The College Dropout (2004) dropped into record stores and turned Kanye into a superstar. Since then, Kanye has been taking advantage of his prominent place in the public eye, sporting flashy jewelry, scooping up Grammies and slamming President Bush over his lackadaisical response to Hurricane Katrina.

But let’s not forget about the music in all of this. Ironically, though Kanye’s post-Dropout success has allowed him to be up-front about his opinions, the album itself was an enigma, albeit a towering, intelligent and masterful enigma. Like its predecessor, Late Registration (2005) is a sprawling work of thought, emotion and musicality, and one that deftly displays Kanye’s conflicting views of himself and the world. Though Kanye the man is often overt, Kanye the rapper is constantly at war with himself, making Late Registration a fascinating document of 21st century rap.

Thankfully, Late Registration is not College Dropout Redux. To avoid repeating himself, West aligned himself with producer Jon Brion, known for his work with Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. If the music is not as ambitious or groove-conscious as it was on Dropout, it’s certainly more diverse, ranging from the melodic sweep of “Bring Me Down” to the post-B.I.G. bump-and-grind of “Crack Music” to the stoned jazz of “Drive Slow.”

But the real highlight is Kanye’s sparkling lyricism. Within each song there is at least one conflict he lays down before us. In “Gold Digger,” he sends both encouraging and reprimanding messages to one particular woman, seeing her as greedy and cunning but still capable of good. “Addiction,” like the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” before it, is not an intentional anti-drug song that is still one of the best anti-drug songs in a long while; when he seduces a lover to take drugs and naked pictures with him, we’re not sure whether we should feel in the mood or get the chills.

Most lasting is “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” in which West extols the virtues of himself and his jewelry and then undergoes contrition for it in the blink of an eye (“Who complains about what he is owed?/And throw a tantrum like he is three years old?”). In a genre whereby excess and braggadocio are defining elements, Kanye’s subtle self-deprecation is, to say the least, fresh; through his fortune and fame, he still elects to see himself and the situation accurately, which can be at odds with the image he wants to or is expected to project to a superficial public.

Of course, Kanye’s myriad insights would be mostly for naught if they weren’t musically appealing, but he’s as much a vocal acrobat as he is a storyteller, and we can delight in Kanye’s raps because of his confidence and versatility in navigating some of the most complex issues on any rap album this century. If College Dropout introduced his cosmically high status, then Late Registration confirms it. And when Kanye says, “Before the day I die/I’m gonna touch the sky,” he’s not kidding.