By: Christian Hines
Kanye West is one of the most well-known artists of our generation. He’s released seven albums over his career and all of them are critically acclaimed. In this two part series, I’m going to talk about how Kanye’s sound and personality changed over each of these albums. Despite these changes, Kanye’s discography is consistently an impressive one and the changes he went through each album are interesting and were important for hip-hop as a whole.
College Dropout. Kanye’s first album is a classic hip hop album, songs like “Jesus Walks” and “Through the Wire” are considered legendary in the hip hop world. Listening to this album you can tell that Kanye started as a producer and had been producing for a long time. He produced everything on this album and the production is absolutely amazing, the sampling of soul songs and use of voices was groundbreaking at the time, and speeding up soul samples is Kanye’s specialty, having really pioneered that sound. For Kanye’s first rap album, he shows skill in rapping; he flows well over his own beats and tells stories and expresses emotion extremely well; this showed that he had amazing potential and listeners loved it.
Late Registration:: Kanye’s second album is somewhat similar to the first, but this album is an upgrade in a sense. First off, while the production on College Dropout was “absolutely amazing,” but Late Registration’s production is better than amazing: it’s absolutely incredible. On this album Kanye teams up with musician Jon
Brion, who co-produced a lot of tracks. Brion’s added instruments bring the production on this album over the edge; each track is amazing with multiple layers with an excellent use of samples. Kanye himself had changed since College Dropout; he’s fresh off the success from that album and he is on top of his game at this point. He’s seems more confident and tries new things that make this album shine; his lines are hard-hitting and impressive, with all kinds of humor and storytelling, such as, “Before anybody wanted K. West beats, me and my girl split the bucket at KFC.” He also picks great features that add to tracks even more, for example artists like Jay-Z, Nas, and Mos Def give amazing verses that make tracks even better. From this you can tell that Kanye just keeps getting better and broadening his horizons. I feel like trying new things and experimenting with new sounds is a staple of Kanye’s success, and much more of that happens over the next albums.
Graduation. Kanye’s third album is not as similar to the first two. The production, while still incredible, is different from the last two, trading abundant amounts of soul samples for synthesizers and a more electronic sound. Kanye makes it work though, with songs like “Stronger” which uses a sample from an electronic song. He did not completely give up his old style; there are still similarities to his previous production, but in a more polished and different way. Kanye shows that he can change his sound and still make amazing music, and it shows his versatility in producing. The lyrical content of this album is not as storytelling-heavy or deep as the previous albums, but include flashier lyrics like, “You don’t see just how wild the crowd is, you don’t see just how fly my style is, I don’t see why I need a stylist.” Kanye kept it simple and had fun with it, creating hits and great songs in the process. The song “Stronger” charted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. You can tell when you listen to this album that Kanye was finding himself and really starting to get good at what he was doing, no matter what people thought of him. Overall, Graduation was the start of sort of a new era of Kanye, and still influenced all of hip-hop at the same time.
Kanye’s first three albums are looked on as some of the most important and influential hip-hop albums of all time. Kanye’s rise from producer to world renowned rapper is an astonishing journey that showcases all of his talents in these three albums. These albums set the bar high, and in the next four, he reaches that bar.
Image Captions:
Caption 1: Cover Art for the Album "College Dropout"
Caption 2: Cover Art for the Album "Late Registration"
Caption 3: Cover Art for the Album "Graduation"
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