Looking at this is giving me cavities
Now, I don't know how someone can first drop out of college, register late, and then graduate, but presumably if anyone could do it, it would be Mr. Kanye West. The reviews of his third album, Graduation, are pouring in, and they are, for the most part, effusive. Stylus, granting a GPA-enhancing A-, says "Musically, at least, it’s the most accomplished thing he’s ever done." Pitchfork clocks West at an 8.7 and Best New Music honors (the fifth album in the past two weeks to get the BNM designation - dag yo), claiming that Graduation is "his greatest leap forward, and further proof that few are as skilled at tracing out the complicated contours of pride, success and ambition as he is." Rolling Stone, in a review shockingly not assigned to Robert Christgau, gives West 4 1/2 stars, noting that there are "no skits" on the record.
I haven't heard all of Graduation yet; major labels enforce their embargoes pretty consistently, nullifying the advantage that living in the epicenter of the Manhattan-Brooklyn-Fords record store triangle confers. I'll probably go to Best Buy or Target at lunch today and pick up the album for $9.99. Listening to the iTunes samples this moring and lead singles "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" and Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger" all I can say is that whatever criticisms you read about Kanye's perceived inability to rap, ignore them: they're irrelevant now. Kanye is hip-hop's most ambitiously pop aspirational figure; you get the feeling that he would rather be Thriller-era Michael Jackson than Tupac Shakur. With Graduation, he's either leaving the relatively conservative formal notion of rap behind, or reshaping it entirely in his image. Two years ago when 50 Cent's The Massacre and Kanye's Late Registration dropped, 50 moved 1.1 million units in the first week of release to West's 860,000; it says a lot about the respective current standings of these two titans of the industry that Graduation is better than even money to take down Curtis when this week's Soundscan figures are totaled.
Now, because we believe in equal time here at Inconsistently Updated, the incomparable, the un-embeddable (wack, yo) Kenny Chesney.
I haven't heard all of Graduation yet; major labels enforce their embargoes pretty consistently, nullifying the advantage that living in the epicenter of the Manhattan-Brooklyn-Fords record store triangle confers. I'll probably go to Best Buy or Target at lunch today and pick up the album for $9.99. Listening to the iTunes samples this moring and lead singles "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" and Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger" all I can say is that whatever criticisms you read about Kanye's perceived inability to rap, ignore them: they're irrelevant now. Kanye is hip-hop's most ambitiously pop aspirational figure; you get the feeling that he would rather be Thriller-era Michael Jackson than Tupac Shakur. With Graduation, he's either leaving the relatively conservative formal notion of rap behind, or reshaping it entirely in his image. Two years ago when 50 Cent's The Massacre and Kanye's Late Registration dropped, 50 moved 1.1 million units in the first week of release to West's 860,000; it says a lot about the respective current standings of these two titans of the industry that Graduation is better than even money to take down Curtis when this week's Soundscan figures are totaled.
Now, because we believe in equal time here at Inconsistently Updated, the incomparable, the un-embeddable (wack, yo) Kenny Chesney.
