The College Dropout, 16 Years Later
the way school need teachers, the way kathie lee needed regis, that's the way i need yeezus
This is definitely late. Approximately seven months late, actually. But I can’t control when my annual Kanye obsession rears its head, and it snuck up and bashed me hard last week and still hasn’t subsided. At this point in history, thinkpieces about Kanye are seemingly contractually obligated to wade into the troubled waters of “What’s been going on with him the last several years?” I’m far from qualified to discuss that— my essential takeaway has largely been that the mental health of Black men is treated as a punchline by the media, which is nothing new, and this essay by Christopher Lebron does a better job of analyzing Kanye’s history of severe mental health struggles and his confusion between economic justice, Black capitalism, and validation from the white supremacist superstructure than I literally ever could begin to write— which leaves me, as usual, with the option of discussing the music itself and what it’s meant to me, personally.
Still, though, listening to The College Dropout with the context of all of Kanye’s subsequent work, it’s extremely difficult to ignore the many, many contrasts between what he once seemed to be and what he seems to be now. It goes far beyond the musical— rapid sonic evolutions between albums has always been a hallmark of Kanye’s work, as the stunningly-short three-year gap between the lush chipmunk soul of The College Dropout and the electronica-infused pop of Graduation proves— and the sharpest differences are to be found in his overall authorial voice, which has progressively traded in his charming blend of self-aware wit and vulnerable emotionality for a more challenging blend of abstract poetry and outsized post-ironic egocentric proclamations.
One thing that has remained undeniable in the nearly two decades since Kanye first burst into the public sphere with his meticulously catchy contributions to Jay-Z’s The Blueprint is that there’s been almost no contemporary hip-hop artist who can claim to be as influential as Kanye. For proof of this, listen to 808s & Heartbreak and realize that mainstream hip-hop production has only begun to move past the foundations laid down by Kanye on that album within the last three or four years. 808s came out in 2008. And this is only my personal opinion, but I do fully believe that Kanye is a contender for the greatest producer in the genre who has ever lived. (I know that this take sounds severely /mu/-poisoned, but I would hold this opinion regardless.)
And despite his alienating public persona, nearly every rap fan has affection for at least a few Kanye records (people my age tend to lean towards his massive five-album run from 2004 to 2010, while people a little younger than me tend to gravitate towards Yeezus and Life of Pablo). Everyone’s mom likes “Gold Digger.” Coworkers who predominantly listen to stuff released within the last eighteen months would still jam “Spaceship” in the back room. Say what you want about Kanye’s opinions, but on a sheer pop songcraft level, he has managed to consistently tap into something that connects with millions of people no matter what they think of his personality.
So on a sheer historical level, it’s not only understandable but completely necessary to take a look back on The College Dropout and what it meant and has come to mean in the larger lexicon of pop music as well as the hip-hop canon. In a lot of ways, Dropout represents the complete and total ascension of hip-hop to the very top of the pop zeitgeist, a position it was rapidly clawing towards throughout the 90s and has since held on to with few challengers. This is not because of its vast commercial success— even upon its release in February of 2004, its formidable sales couldn’t hold a candle to the massive success that OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was still enjoying— but because it represented the long-percolating union of two of the most disparate threads of hip-hop: the “commercial” and the “real.”
In hindsight, it seems comical that someone could deny the artistry of hip-hop’s pop juggernauts, as mainstream hip-hop artists today routinely release sonically exploratory and technically accomplished records seemingly every year, and people who cling to 90s classics and backpacker touchstones are rightfully regarded as corny and out-of-touch. But The College Dropout arrived directly in the wake of records like 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and although that record is taut with the crackling energy of 50’s hunger and masterful storytelling, many underground heads dismissed it entirely on the basis of hit single “In Da Club,” which to many represented the complete vapidity of the post-gangsta, post-mafioso school of hip-hop, a celebration of the worst excesses of the shiny suit era with simplistic lyrics and a big dumb beat to boot.
Again, in retrospect it seems bizarre that some could overlook the bouncy Southern production, impeccable comic timing, and occasional political overtones of a record like Ludacris’s Chicken-n-Beer while simultaneously singing the praises of Southernunderground by CunninLynguists, which quite literally features all those same qualities, only with an extra veneer of underground “credibility.” It makes slightly more sense that some would resist the overt ridiculousness of The Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get Retarded” in favor of embracing the highly sophisticated songcraft of Soul Position’s debut 8 Million Stories, but all this elides the fact that this identity crisis in hip-hop’s timeline seemed to be a matter of aesthetics more than actual musical quality (especially since OutKast enjoyed equal credibility on both sides of the aisle).
This is accentuated by what many thought of as “preachiness” on the part of many underground rappers— “conscious rap” had started to become something of a pejorative, and tracks like Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” previously thought of as poignant, were derided as elitist or resistant to change and the shifting tides of relevance. “Backpacker”— a term that originated from the kids who prayed at the altar of Bobbito and Stretch, who often turned up at shows toting backpacks stocked with spray paint, fat caps, Mean Streaks, and black books— was as much an insult as it was a description; it denoted a certain type of hip-hop fan, who was always certain to refer to the stuff they dug as “hip-hop” and the commercial stuff as “rap,” who clung to underground freestyle competitions like Scribble Jam as representation of the “Four Elements” that they saw commercial hip-hop as abandoning.
Of course, as with any musical/ideological split in any genre and culture, there were artists who blurred the lines. Throughout the late 90s and early 00s, the Soulquarians collective parlayed their critical acclaim into increasing commercial success, bolstered by the lush and watery neo-soul sound of D’Angelo and Erykah Badu as well as the reputation and widely-recognized talent of Q-Tip, Common, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli (the latter two of whom had scored a massive coup with the debut record of their duo Black Star). Questlove of the Roots was a vital force behind the collective’s musical direction, as were the production efforts of J Dilla. All of these artists are embedded in the history of hip-hop, rightfully seen as pivotal and influential participants in the genre’s push towards ever-higher levels of sonic sophistication.
The College Dropout was released on Roc-A-Fella, the record label spearheaded by Hov, Dame Dash, and Biggs in 1995. Throughout the late 90s and early 00s, the label was mostly carried on the back of Jay-Z’s commercial successes— many forget that it took a few months for Reasonable Doubt to gather steam, and in the label’s early days, they got openly snubbed by Nas, whose group the Firm was supposed to be among their first signees— but it was clear that the label had an extremely sharp eye for talent, recruiting artists like Memphis Bleek and Beanie Sigel, and were among the first to bring young producers with untapped potential like Just Blaze and the Neptunes into the fold. Notably, the label was embroiled in constant drama rooted in a rivalry with DMX’s Ruff Ryders crew (Jay’s use of longtime Ruff Ryders affiliate Swizz Beatz notwithstanding, there had always been tension between him and X, and Sigel’s beef with Jadakiss was one of the most creatively-charged battles of the early 00s).
As Roc-A-Fella expanded their repertoire, with commercially successful records from Cam’ron and Freeway, among others, helping to make the label more than just Jay’s vanity project, their decision to sign Kanye as a rapper rather than just a producer was a contentious one. For one thing, although Ye had always aspired to be a rapper, his background— a middle-class suburbanite who got good grades in school— stood in stark contrast to the rags-to-riches arcs of many of his labelmates. Kanye also refused to front as more street than he was, which ironically made him read as less “authentic” at the time. Ultimately, his signing was a result of a meeting with Capitol Records, as Roc-A-Fella was wary of losing Kanye as a producer.
As an artist, he had been mentored by Chicago scene luminary No I.D., and had produced for underground records like Grav’s Down to Earth, and his ear for pop hooks and complex dynamics imbued more traditional-sounding tracks with a forward-thinking sonic depth. You can see this play out on his contributions to The Blueprint— he didn’t create outright bangers as he did more contemplative fare, and his songs often slowly stacked layers and melodies on top of each other as they progressed, building to subdued climaxes awash in intricate drum patterns and thoughtful melodic interplay that competed for attention and sonic space with the rappers themselves. All of this would have been a touch too busy had Kanye not been a good rapper in his own right, but at the time, he was still largely unproven. The College Dropout famously took years to record, and there are beats on the record that he had been holding onto since the late 90s to use for himself. It wasn’t until the release of his Get Well Soon mixtape at the end of 2002, and his breakthrough track “Through the Wire,” that Roc-A-Fella would have reason to be confident about this alternately cocky and insecure newcomer.
“Through the Wire” almost immediately attained a legendary status that was previously reserved for established icons and full-length projects. The song’s production wasn’t just far more propulsive and layered than his previous beats. It also was one of the first examples of Kanye’s first major production innovation, the “chipmunk soul” style— soul, R&B, and gospel samples sped up and pitch-shifted until the words were nearly garbled (in this case, manipulating a 1985 Chaka Khan track until “fire” sounded like “wire”), and mixed with overwhelmingly lush instrumentals— which would eventually inspire even established artists like Common and Twista to adopt the sound for their own, and was an essential sonic foundation for up-and-coming artists like Lupe Fiasco. Ironically, though it was accomplished with samplers, it seemed to owe something intangible to the melding of manipulated crate-dug beats and live instrumentation that the Soulquarians collective had honed. (Even more ironically, it really was adapted from the production that RZA had been innovating throughout the late 90s and early 00s, but Kanye made it far less sparse and aggressive.)
But it wasn’t just the production that made “Through the Wire” so striking. The name of the song itself came from Kanye’s jaw getting wired shut after a car crash that nearly killed him, and rather than waiting for it to heal, he decided to rap through it. This underdog defiance was immediately endearing in itself, but the surprising thing about “Through the Wire” even all these years later is how you can still Kanye’s distinctive flow beneath the clenched-teeth delivery. He managed to convey that previously-mentioned mixture of confidence and diffidence through a laid-back, at times almost sing-songy flow, often extending his words past their matched beat and picking up the slack with another vocal track beneath. That in and of itself wasn’t much of an innovation, and neither was his penchant for wordplay and out-of-left-field pop culture references (“If you could feel how my face felt you would know how Mase felt” is a clever double-entendre in and of itself, but “They thought I was burnt up like Pepsi did Michael” is a deep-cut reference that I wonder if most people listening today would still get). But what felt revolutionary was his easy mixture of the casual and confessional— his spoken apology for the potential lack of clarity and his description of events over the chorus is particularly memorable— and his ability to fuse witty self-awareness, “conscious” rap aesthetics, and self-consciously comical braggadocio all at once:
What if somebody from the Chi that was ill got a deal
On the hottest rap label around?
But he wasn’t talkin’ ‘bout coke and birds
It was more like spoken word, ‘cept he’s really puttin’ it down?
“Through the Wire” changed everything for Kanye. Shortly after the release of Get Well Soon, he announced that he was working on his debut LP (although, again, it had been gestating since at least 1999). In late 2003, a re-recorded version of “Through the Wire” attained steady radio airplay and hype, bolstered a few months later by the release of “Slow Jamz” (originally a single from Twista’s Kamikaze, but with extra verses from Jamie Foxx on the Dropout version).
“Slow Jamz” is a great single itself— stacked with an absolutely gorgeous hook and riddled with early Kanye’s trademark self-deprecation (“Damn, I can’t go that fast!” as the lead-in to Twista’s verse still makes me laugh). But the single that truly elevated The College Dropout to pop domination came two weeks after the album’s release, with the Syleena-led “All Falls Down.” Built off an interpolation of “Mystery of Iniquity” by Lauryn Hill— whose album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill has been cited as the biggest sonic influence on The College Dropout— “All Falls Down” is this version of Kanye’s ultimate statement of purpose. It is effervescently catchy, addictively so— Syleena’s hook is a constant presence, often underscoring Kanye’s verses. As a rapper and lyricist, it’s an extreme high water mark. Kanye’s flow is catchy in and of itself (admit it, that “insecurr/securr/yurrs/carurr/stay down hurr and do hair” flow gets stuck in your head constantly too) but it’s also a studious examination of retail addiction both in spite of and because of economic disadvantage. Kanye openly acknowledges his self-consciousness while in the same breath underscoring the cognitive dissonance between staying true to “low” street culture through a fascination with “high” fashion culture, and making the listener laugh all at the same time— “I can’t even pronounce nothin’, pass that ver-say-see!”
The College Dropout is defined in large part by this intuitive critique of capitalism and its pathological subjugation of Black people, while also positing success within the capitalist infrastructure as one of the only material possibilities for that same Black underclass to achieve economic freedom. This cutthroat dedication to climbing up the ladder extends to the album’s name and the ever-present critique of higher education, which Kanye quite presciently indicts as a pyramid scheme that more often leaves people pursuing that path with oppressive debt, dour job prospects, and no escape from the cycle of generational poverty (again, this is all delivered with a knowing smirk, as “School Spirit” and its attendant skits contain some of the funniest and most cutting moments on the whole record).
Another running theme on The College Dropout, which would ultimately become one of Kanye’s signature talking points, is spirituality and faith. Crucially, here it is less evangelical than it is intimately personal. “Jesus Walks” is less of a plea for anyone to walk with Kanye’s religion of choice than it is a critique of what he saw as a lack of depth in mainstream hip-hop at the time— a curiously “backpacker”-esque sentiment delivered on one of the catchiest tracks on the album. “Never Let Me Down” houses a downright “spiritual lyrical miracle” verse from Jay-Z, but it differentiates itself from the “poor righteous teachers” mentality of much of 90s rap by grounding itself in an explicitly Christian morality, and still avoids overt preachiness by eliding the spirituality of J. Ivy’s hook in favor of a dance between Kanye’s thankfulness to his parents and grandparents and Jay-Z’s dedication to the rap game itself. (In this regard, it’s very unsurprising that Chance the Rapper, whose work is deeply gospel-infused and whose activism is deeply indebted to his spirituality, has said that The College Dropout is the first hip-hop record he ever heard.)
Kanye’s production and lyricism are, in this writer’s opinion, never more evenly matched than they are on The College Dropout, each challenging the other to be more complex, more memorable, more bombastic, more sneakily sophisticated throughout the record. Opener “We Don’t Care” is an even more pointed critique of capitalism than “All Falls Down,” soaring on the back of a gospel-laden base that, again, is far more dynamic than most other hip-hop on the mainstream charts at the time, with a fully-formed song structure in which the verses and hooks play off each other rather than being two separate pieces of the work. Kanye’s cheeky use of a children’s choir emphasizes the hopelessness-as-triumph thematics, celebrating drug dealing as a form of income while defiantly pointing the finger at systemic oppression— “As a shorty I looked up to the dope man/only adult man I knew that wasn’t broke, man… Ain’t no tuition for having no ambition/and ain’t no loan for sitting your ass at home/so we forced to sell crack, rap, and get a job.”
Kanye proclaiming himself to be the first with a Benz and a backpack wasn’t empty posturing. The College Dropout was the first and perhaps the best synthesis of the ethos of the commercial and the ethos of the underground. If you can find an earlier album that flaunted features from Ludacris and Jay-Z and Talib Kweli and Common, well, that’d be news to me. But more than that, it was one of the first times that someone in hip-hop’s mainstream openly showed the negative side of ruthless ambition. Hip-hop had undeniably become one of the few avenues from which poor Black kids with few prospects could launch a career. It stands to reason that someone would hold resentment about the seeming incompatibility between the conscious and the commercial, but few if any could explicate as smoothly and cleverly as Kanye does on “Breathe In, Breathe Out”:
Golly, more of that bullshit ice rap
I got to ‘pologize to Mos and Kweli
…
Always said if I rapped I’d say something significant
But now I’m rappin’ ‘bout money, hoes, and rims again
…
I’m tryin’ to spend my stacks, and I’m so broke
I look back like, “Damn, was I on crack?”
I mean, twelve platinum chains, was I on that?
What the hell was wrong with me, dawg?
There are few musical missteps on The College Dropout— many would point to “The New Workout Plan,” which is extremely messy and features a far too lengthy and anti-climactic bridge. But overall, it’s a remarkably consistent effort, and it’s even more remarkable that it manages to straddle so many different styles and flirt with so many points of view at once. It was Rawkus meets Roc-A-Fella, and more than that, articulated something extremely important to the mid-00s Black middle class youth, which hadn’t had anyone representing them in the mainstream to that point. As Aundre Larrow would later write for the album’s 10-year anniversary in the Chicago Reader:
“[W]earing baggy junk and being a badass didn't appeal to me. It didn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle. Talking mess and threatening people? I saw it where I lived and I saw it in these songs, and it honestly wasn't for me. It was like the story of how we got here wasn't important. All we were focused on was that we had it, ignoring the pain that we carried on our way to the top.
As a young Black kid, especially one who got to walk the line between some dangerous environments and some much better ones, Kanye was this beautiful means to be true to both sides of me…
I wanted to be able to wear clothes that fit me better but still command the respect that's important in the Black community. It wasn't that I wanted to be white—it's that I knew that the particular way of being a Black man set out for me was one that I didn't fit into or want to… I wanted to be able to wear clothes that fit me better but still command the respect that's important in the Black community. It wasn't that I wanted to be white—it's that I knew that the particular way of being a Black man set out for me was one that I didn't fit into or want to.
…[W]ithout him, the "n—a you gay" ceiling would still be intact. Fear of opening up and being vulnerable would keep the necessary kind of music away from the ears of all the little brown boys and girls who know that they have to blend their African-American culture with that of a white-dominated society.”
Kanye would go on to be one of the first mainstream rappers to openly condemn homophobia within the culture, but beyond that, he (along with OutKast’s Andre 3000) expanded the boundaries of the types of masculinity and the level of vulnerability that was acceptable to express in mainstream hip-hop. Tupac had “Dear Mama” and Biggie had “Suicidal Thoughts,” but both songs stood in stark contrast to the overtly masculine persona of not just the hip-hop of their era, but the personas of Tupac and Biggie themselves. “Emo rap” is an oft-used catch-all nowadays, and many of its roots truly do lie in the underground Rhymesayers scene, sound, and ethos that was pioneered by Atmosphere (and pushed even further with Gym Class Heroes in the mid-00s), but Kanye was the one who revealed as much of his soul, his hopes and fears as possible in almost every track on The College Dropout. It wasn’t that he was being explicitly “emo” in the traditional sense, or even in the sense that hip-hop adapted to it with Kid Cudi and Drake in the latter part of the aughts, but it was that he was able to blend the far ends of vulnerability and braggadocio so seamlessly and with such panache.
The lower-middle-class striving and hatred of menial labor that informed “Spaceship” comes from the same emotions that informed “Family Business,” and that consistency holds true throughout the entire album. The running themes of The College Dropout all coalesce beautifully in album closer, “Last Call.” The lengthy, piecemeal self-mythologizing that makes up the last 9 minutes of the track aside, the first and more meaty four minutes of “Last Call” is an intimate and funny-as-ever exploration of Kanye’s insecurities and aspirations. He’s extremely conscious of the expectations of failure that Roc-A-Fella had for the record, and is also open about how “Nobody was interested/til the night I almost killed myself in a Lexus.” He even explicates what I said earlier in this very essay when he references how he put Freeway and Mos Def on the same track (“Two Words”). There’s witty lines galore (I’ve always been a particular fan of the “African-American Express” flip), but the thing that really cements who Kanye was and how he would evolve is almost hidden among everything else:
Now I could let these dream killers kill my self-esteem
Or use my arrogance as the power to fuel my dreams
I use it as my gas, so they say that I’m gassed
But without it I’d be last, so I oughta laugh
The College Dropout ends like it began— clever, self-aware, and expressly intimate. You can disagree as to what the best Kanye album is, or even what the most important or influential Kanye album is, but you can’t deny that The College Dropout is the most clearly Kanye ever saw himself, at least on record. And I’d like you to think about it every time you make a joke about his latest Twitter meltdown. Has he made mistakes? Yes. Has he used his platform irresponsibly? Yes. Have his indescribable contributions to the sound and culture been tragically sidelined by his public antics? Yes. But no one can talk about Kanye like Kanye talks about Kanye. Show some respect.
-xoxo, Ellie
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