Kanye has had his ups and downs with not only the general public, but his own fans. Many of his antics have been hard to appreciate, from the Taylor Swift incident to some of his more bizarre interviews, to his decision to settle down with a reality TV star. The rapper’s latest album “Yeezus”was not embraced as wholeheartedly as many of his previous works.
So with all of the backlash against Kanye, how is it that the recent 10th anniversary of the release of his first album “The College Dropout,”was still such a big occasion on social media? What makes the album such a classic? First of all, it’s the beats. Around that time in hip hop, the biggest trend was to have female R&B singer singing the hook and have raps in between. Kanye took that one step further by making his choruses awesome samples over beats that didn’t even need any help.
Secondly, it was that the man had a message to deliver to America. And back then, the message was not how great Kanye West is. The opening track of the album, ‘We Don’t Care,” has a hook that speaks about drug dealing, drawing in the audience looking for stereotypical hip hop messages while playing on those themes. Then in the verses Kanye hits his audience with the realization that he is asking for a change. He is not telling kids to become drug dealers, he is telling society “you know kids are gonna act a fool/ when you stop the programs for after-school,” meaning if we don’t do something, this drug dealing out of desperation will continue in poor neighborhoods.
The interlude after the song “We Don’t Care” is one of my favorite parts of the album. It is basically Kanye being told that because of his song about selling drugs, he won’t be graduating college. This implies that Kanye does not expect people to understand his underlying message and metaphors. He expected to be misunderstood then, and he’s been misunderstood ever since.
The rest of the album goes on to address a number of things that are clearly close to Kanye’s heart, from internal struggles with being too materialistic to being unapologetic enough to talk about Jesus in mainstream hip hop, to fears about being stuck in meaningless jobs if his risks hadn’t paid off. I think this theme of working to survive is what really made the album relatable to all of America. At that time glorifying yourself as a gangster was so popular in music. I think although kids got enchanted by that, it wasn’t truly that relatable for many people, black or white. Kanye talks about experiencing racism while working hard at the Gap and still being broke and trying to get people to take him seriously.
The last component to “The College Dropout” being a classic is obviously the rhymes. Not only is Kanye a master of words, but he selected some great people to be featured on the album. He has Jay-Z and Ludacris on there, but amazingly he also has a lot of rappers who were widely unknown to people who were not huge hip hop fans at the time, for example Talib Kweli and Common. Instead of their less notable status taking away from the album, I think it helped people discover a more underground and meaningful side of hip hop.
I am not a huge “Yeezus” fan, not a huge Kardashian fan, and I while I don’t mind leather pants, I don’t want to hear about them incessantly in interviews. However, nothing Kanye does now can really take away how much I love “The College Dropout” and how important I think it was. It was a representation of real American life that became a part of American pop culture, and those two things don’t always link up perfectly, but thank’s to Kanye’s plan, they did.