Music Box | Kanye West

Mike Newmark Columnist

Kanye West
Graduation
[Roc-A-Fella]

Kanye West has never looked, sounded, or acted like anyone else in hip-hop, period. On “Everything I Am,” West name-drops his contemporaries for their decadent lifestyles: “I never rock a mink coat in the wintertime like Killa Cam / Or rock some mink boots in the summertime like will.i.am / Let me know if you feel it man / ’Cause everything I’m not made me everything I am.” Reluctant as I am to venerate diss tracks, he’s right. Here is a rapper who risked his career to proclaim that President Bush hated black people on national television, who released an entire album produced by Jon Brion (producer/collaborator for Aimee Mann), and who started out life after higher education as a mid-level Roc-A-Fella producer who wore a polo shirt just to impress some sleazy record executives. Yes, he is known to sport jewelry and flashy clothing now and again, but no amount of bling can hide the sincere, vulnerable college dropout who kept on keeping on anyway.

The allusion to school in West’s discography strikes me as humbling in the rap game, where imperfection of any kind is verboten, but it’s appropriate for an artist who spoke more about vying for the top than actually being there. Now he’s attending his own Graduation, and fittingly enough, it’s both his most confident and most subdued record, not to mention his leanest: Thirteen songs appear here, only two of which exceed five minutes. Graduation is also the least reliant on hip-hop clichés; the closest sonic reference point is Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor, which didn’t sound much like a hip-hop record anyhow. In the plasmatic, sparkling melodic backdrops plucked from a 1987 R&B smash, it’s now possible to hear a Kanye West “sound”—previously obscured by guest producers—in full bloom.

No Kanye West album would be complete without an opening salvo, and this time it’s “Champion,” a ridiculously self-assured manifesto that obliterates any doubt about whether West believes he’s made it. It feels like the second half of a story that began with Late Registration’s “Touch the Sky,” in which West and Lupe Fiasco vowed that, someday, they would. But “Touch the Sky” is too loud, too blaring for West’s attitude these days. Instead, “Champion” sports laid-back, sun-drenched keyboard lines that dare not to be catchy, and make great foils for West’s verses celebrating modesty. “Stronger” is even more minimalist: Its melody is simply the vocodered parts of Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” slowed down to syrupy speeds. By the time you reach the nearly all-piano “Everything I Am,” the message becomes clear: The music is a support for the lyrics, track for track.

Those lyrics are typical West, if a bit more unambiguous this time around. The one place you would expect him to flaunt his status, he backs off. In “Champion,” he answers the call, “Did you realize that you were a champion?” with “Yes I did, so I packed it up and brought it back to the crib / Just a little something show you how we live / Everybody want it but it ain’t that serious.” He does loosen his collar a bit on “Stronger” and “The Good Life,” though they’re split by “I Wonder,” a song in which he talks about his hip-hop tenure as a gift from God. On “Drunk and Hot Girls,” West sings in defiantly slow speech, “We go through too much bullshit to mess with these drunk and hot girls.” When I heard this, I fell sideways out of my chair. He said what? Clearly, this song and several others aren’t going to play in too many Escalades on the way to the club; Graduation is as mature as the event it describes.

West hasn’t struck out once after three swings of the bat, but Graduation is not a perfect album. It’s front-loaded, and loses steam by its last third, but it really misses the boat in its treatment of guest artists. Coldplay’s Chris Martin doesn’t make “Homecoming” any less lame, and his rather anonymous contribution can’t be worth what West paid for it. Butter-smooth crooner Dwele is woefully out of place on the nervy “Flashing Lights,” especially in the context of his own jazz-tinged soul that’s made him a quiet sensation. Mos Def—whose career seems to hit new lows with each passing year—actually sings on “Drunk and Hot Girls,” and ignominiously embarrasses himself. I admire West’s instinct to branch out, but he’d do well to look at El-P’s stunning I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead as an exemplar of how to dexterously assimilate disparate guests into one devastating sucker-punch.

In fact, it would have been most appropriate for Graduation to be a guestless effort, because West’s stamp is all over it: in the glistening music, in his clear and deliberate flow, in the messages that always feel well-deserved and never didactic. Considering that Graduation is the dénouement of West’s college-themed series (unless he releases a fourth album entitled Horror Stories from the Med School Library), it also sounds expectedly like a wave goodbye; “Big Brother” evokes rainbows and kids of all colors holding hands and singing “we are the children” in unison. Countless rappers would have used this opportunity to crank up the volume and pull out all the stops. Instead, Kanye West recorded his most definitive album, confidently strutting away from the limelight and smiling to us the whole time. It’s a hell of a way to bow out.