oneweekoneband:

Hump day, right? It’s not accident that we’re talking about Graduation on Wednesday. (It is 100% accidental, actually.) On the third day, Yeezus gave us a transitional album, a flashy new persona, shutter shades, and it was good.

I’m going to lay my cards on the table: as I implied in my introduction, I heard Graduation last of all Kanye’s solo albums. I really missed out on a lot of Kanye’s big media appearances at this point in his career, the neon clothing and lasers and all that. (I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is sort of like paradise if you like breakfast burritos and cheap turquoise jewelry. Who could blame me?) Therefore, Graduation has always (for the last thirteen months, at least) seemed like a chamber orchestra version of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s wickedly clipping symphony.

I started listening to Graduation while I was sort of deeply in the thrall of Kanye’s ego, and it seemed like equal parts the end of his early (or middle) career and the beginning of his real ambitious later career. Of course, as I hope I showed, his early/middle career was mad ambitious. The fact that Graduation ended up being so great, then, sort of blows my mind.

He finally started collaborating with Mike Dean and using crazy samples: Steely Dan, Can, Daft Punk. While he could and would dip into the ‘neo-soul’ well, again, Kanye’s also well on his way to something else altogether musically. Graduation is my second-favorite K. West album, and at times I think it’s my favorite. The experience of listening to it is incredibly uplifting to me. At some point in each of Kanye’s preceding albums, there’s a song that ruins their momentum. On College Dropout, that song is “Spaceship” (though if you like that song, the album continues to flow for a while after that). On Late Registration, the album is interrupted at “Drive Slow”. Graduation — while not sequenced perfectly — has no filler, no clunkers, no momentum killers. The only song that’s not getting at least an A from me is “Barry Bonds”. Wayne’s verse is terrible, so that sort of evens out all the praise he gets for his verse on 808s and Heartbreak’s “See You In My Nightmares”, right? So at this point, if you’re doing a seat race with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I think you swap “Barry Bonds” with “So Appalled”, and, damn I don’t know. Graduation might win that contest. Also, it might be art, but that Chris Rock shit marks a backslide into skit territory. I cannot tell you how glad I am — listening to Graduation — to not have to skip past skits. So if I’m being honest here, I’d have to say Graduation is 1A and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is 1B.

Graduation is my favourite Kanye West album. It came out when I was in the middle of my MA and it helped me learn to embrace my own inner egomaniac, which is the only way to get through grad school sometimes.