The legacy of Kanye West as a cultural figure is still being written and it’s sure as hell complicated. Following a public break with his long-time wife Kim Kardashian and a failed Presidential bid in 2020, West (who was always a lightning rod for controversy) delved further into the obscene, making numerous antisemitic comments that praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, identified as a Nazi, and said that 400 years of black slavery was a choice. The role of mental health in this colossal and very very public breakdown is a source of debate, especially with West’s bipolar diagnosis in 2016 that he has vacillated between accepting and utterly rejecting, but effectively West has burned an unprecedented amount of personal and professional bridges over the past three years and set his reputation aflame with a self-inflicted flamethrower.
Despite all this, Kanye’s contributions to the world of music are unprecedented and will forever remain so. Simply put, Kanye was (and still is) one the largest acts in the history of music, a proverbial titan that single-handedly changed the face of hip-hop, merged multiple genres into a cohesive unit, and influenced countless MC’s. His body of work spanning a 20-year career is unparalleled.
Graduation was Kanye’s coming out party, the album that saw him graduate (pardon the pun but I’m positive this was intentional, as everything with Kanye at that time was intentional) from Jay-Z’s cherished protege to his noteworthy equal. Graduation‘s extensive musical range actually took inspiration from the rock band U2 who Yeezy toured with during 2006. Galvanized by the massive arenas he was playing in each night, West put a renewed focus on achieving “stadium-status” hip-hop, leveraging synthesizers, electric dance beats, and an overall denser production style to achieve this vision.
The results are irrefutable. Between “Champion”, “Stronger”, “Flashing Lights”, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”, “Good Life”, and “Homecoming”, Kanye’s stadium-rock bonafides were solidified. 99% of MC’s would love to have just one of the career-defining singles that Graduation is filled with, and yet Kanye was able to fill this album with damn near seven of them and still have enough gas left in the tank to strip it all down and expose himself in an unironically self-reflective way during the lovely “Everything I Am”. There’s something so incredibly poignant about the way Kanye utters the hook “People talkin’ shit, but when the shit hit the fan / Everything I’m not made me everything I am” that’s really stuck with me.
It’s a life lesson for all of us, how we’re defined not just by what we do, but also by what we don’t do. An especially piercing reminder considering Kanye’s recent fall from grace.
Standout Songs: “Flashing Lights”, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”, “Good Life”, “Everything I Am”, “Homecoming”
