While not my favorite album of all time, nor my favorite Kanye album, Graduation is the first record with which I connected. Graduation, the final installment in Kanye’s education-themed trilogy (initially intended to be a tetralogy) and the last Kanye album to don the Dropout Bear on its cover, is an easy yet captivating listen. While his first two albums relied heavily, not to any fault though, on soul samples, Kanye vastly expanded his source of inspiration with his incorporation of electronic music and synthesizers being the most striking difference between this work and his previous records. In addition to the sonic changes, Graduation was significantly shorter than his first two albums. In previous years, it had been customary to litter hip-hop albums with skits. The College Dropout comprised 21 tracks including 5 skits. Late Registration comprised 21 tracks including 4 skits. Graduation comprised 13 tracks; no skits. This allowed for a seamless 51 minutes of Kanye.
Kanye’s willingness to repeatedly abandon hip-hop norms in favor of reinvention is demonstrative of the musical ambitions he had from the get-go. His first album, released in early 2004, was the most conventionally hip-hoppy piece of work in his discography, but three albums in and Kanye is drawing inspiration from British rock band and French EDM, experiments that his peers wouldn’t have dared to take. In the weeks and days leading up to the release of Graduation, there was a media frenzy surrounding the inevitable competition between Kanye and 50 Cent as the two rappers chose the same release date for their albums. But while both rappers were commercially successful, that day marked a paradigm shift in the trajectory of hip-hop. 50, the poster boy of 2000s gangsta rap was phasing out and the people were looking towards something more all-encompassing. The so-called competition between the two also highlighted the differences in their mindsets. 50 was set on the throne of world’s greatest rapper, but Kanye couldn’t have cared less about that title. Kanye wanted to be the best in music, period.
In a Complex article where he lists his favorite albums, Chance the Rapper credits Graduation with teaching him how to tailor his songwriting and producing to live performances. Kanye’s affinity for putting on a show is particularly manifested in the album’s fourth song, I Wonder. Not only is it one of the artist’s favorite songs on his album, but also it was created specifically to be performed. In 2005 and 2006, Kanye accompanied Irish rock band U2 on its Vertigo Tour and watching the magnitude with which its song City of Blinding Lights filled arenas inspired Kanye to create the hip-hop version of that song. While making the song, Kanye envisioned himself performing it to a crowd of thousands which led to the song’s staccato articulation and minimalist lyrical content.
From the valedictorian proclamation of Good Morning to the boastful, self-validating Can’t Tell Me Nothing to the penultimate ode to Chicago, Homecoming, every song on the Dropout Bear’s farewell showing provides the listener with a cutting-edge demonstration of Kanye West at the peak of his powers. The king of the Midwest was very well a household name by the release of his third full-length project in 2007, but Graduation sees Kanye expel himself from the small community he inhabited prior and continue his pursuit of world domination. Takashi Murakami, “the Warhol of Japan,” was tasked with designing the album’s cover art and described the imagery as representative of the tornado of sentimentality and aggressiveness that is Kanye’s music. Kanye is a force to be reckoned with and as he tells us on the record, we can’t tell him nothing.