The first installment of the Classic Album Review series is covering Kanye West's "Graduation". The idea of the series is for me to listen to albums that are considered classic but I haven't heard before.
So going in to this album I didn't really have many expectations. The only other Kanye albums that I have listened to are "The Life of Pablo" and "Ye". Although he is a really big artist, he's never been someone on my radar. So going in I didn't have too many preconceptions of what it would sound like, I knew instrumentally it was going to be strong, and I thought it would have some controversial lyrics. The only songs I knew going in were "Stronger", "Good Life" and "Everything I am".
I think the vibe of the album is really positive, celebratory album which ties in well with the actual name of the album. You can hear this on most of the songs, probably the best example of this is the hook on "Can't Tell Me Nothing". That hook is for me the best hook on the album and one of the best hooks I've heard anywhere.
The beats were really theatrical, in a good way, they were all coherent with one another, so there wasn't anything too left field, but they were still different enough to the point where none of the songs sounded the same. A lot of rappers get criticized for always rapping on the same type of beat, but that is definitely not something you could say about Kanye. Everyone knows Kanye is really experimental with his music, and because I haven't heard all his albums, I don't know if that's something he has developed as his career has gone along, but with songs like "Stronger" and "Flashing Lights" you can see how that side of him was creeping in.
This album is full of nice bars and I definitely wasn't giving him enough credit as a lyricist. With Kanye, because he's such a good producer, you can forget he's a more than competent rapper. His natural flow was easy, quite standard but he knew how to complement the beats most of the time. His actual rhyme placement on the bars was fairly ordinary, this isn't a bad thing and doesn't take away from his music, but it would be good if he switched that up more and tried a few harder flows too.
I liked pretty much all the songs on this album, some took a while to grow on me, like "Barry Bonds", one track I am still a bit undecided on is "Homecoming" and there was just two songs I didn't like, "I Wonder" and "Drunk and Hot Girls". The sample on "I Wonder" is really good, but on both of these I couldn't get passed the flow. They were fairly long songs, "Drunk and Hot Girls" was the longest on the album. His flow just made it a chore to listen to, I get what he was doing, but it just came across a bit boring for me, and he wasn't necessarily doing anything that witty or clever with the lyrics. However, to only dislike 2 songs is a pretty good return I reckon, and he's not some mad lyricist, but I definitely respect his pen game more now and 100% know he holds his own. Also you can definitely hear Jay Z in him as well, I'm sure that's probably not an original take, but just thought I'd add that.
With brilliant, exciting instrumentals and good lyrics, Kanye has an amazing ability to craft songs which create moods. This album shows what a brilliant song-maker he is and I am looking forward to checking out "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" which I am going to also review, I've heard that album is his best so far.
But as for Graduation, I'd give it a solid 8.5/10.
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