These onion layers of Kanye West’s reputation are sure to make you cry these days, especially if you’re a true fan of hip-hop. To be honest, Kanye’s first album, The College Dropout (2004), took me a little while to get into, though now I can nod to “Slow Jamz”; “Get ’em High”; “Spaceship” and “Jesus Walks” to the best of ’em.
Late Registration (2005), though, his second album, fell into my lap and sublimated me into complete musical euphoria, right from the opening track, “Heard ’em Say.” It was so CHICAGO to me — it had this Windy City vibe that’s hard to fully explain but is full of rhythm, feeling and sacrifice, as it has to be. For a boy from South Bend like me, the experience was invaluable and would forge a permanent distinction in my mind.
And it seems like, already, around this time, Kanye was starting to gather haters, probably for being too commercial. Enter “Gold Digger.” It really seemed, that is, like one of those phenomena where people observe true genius and then compulsively launch into this preventive mindset of trying to deny the salience of the stimuli around them. It was one thing after another. I hate Kanye’s pink polo shirt. I hate Kanye’s chains and watches. I hate the fact that Kanye’s so commercial… you know Chicago underground hip-hop is such a huge moneymaker and everything.
So Late Registration, in and of itself, is a bulbous beast to the extent that it altered reality for pretty much everybody who heard it. What’s more, different segments altered reality for different people, in different ways.
One thing remains true, anyway. Any true fan of hip-hop… sh**, anybody with a HEART, who isn’t too jealous or jaded to appreciate great music, should enjoy the middle section of this second Kanye album, Late Registration. The specific tracks to which I’m referring or “My Way Home”; “Crack Music”; “Bring Me down”; “Roses”; “Addiction” and “Hey Mama”; to not necessarily discount “Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix),” which albeit does feature H.O.V.A. in his usual cocky and fiduciarily minded corporeality.
But this section of the album is just full of stuff that nobody else does. In this whole journey, this middle portion, you will not find a single mundane song about money or picking up chicks, the two typical topics in hip-hop (particularly commercial or mainstream hip-hop). What’s more, as a producer, Kanye was able to complement all of his discursive rants, from mourning loss, to contemplating addiction, to praising and giving thanks to his mama, with sets and facets of rhythmic textures each to cater to its own universe, yielding a musical experience truly special and what’s more, purposeful and exact. The middle section of Late Registration is where the wide, tired notion of “conscious hip-hop” zooms in and gets fun and trippy, and what’s more, undeniably real and irreproducible.
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