Give Life Back To Music 08.19.13: Kanye West – Graduation

“Always do your best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be differently when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.”

To a soul, I would wager a month of my day-job’s wages that everyone reading this has heard this many times and many ways both before and upon reaching adulthood.

Personally, I’ll always recognize it as The Fourth Agreement in Don Miguel Ruiz’s acclaimed esoteric spiritual guide The Four Agreements. It’s often easier said than done – “simplicity” often being markedly distinct from “ease” – but it is quite possibly the most rudimentary proposition directed toward a life lived with few regrets: whatever your endeavor, hold nothing back, so that you’re never left to wonder in the passing moments that follow how that little bit more that you could’ve given might’ve altered the outcome.

To date, Kanye West has never phoned in an album. He’s always poured himself 100-percent headlong into every release.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that everything has always come up Millhouse. Some albums, such as today’s chapter, might take a listen or two with the right perspective on the man himself in order to reach a complete appreciation. Keep one thing in mind: everything he releases is composed of his perspective from a single, never-to-be-duplicated autobiographical vantage point.

I may not always exactly like what the man has to say. I also can’t help but admire his stalwart integrity to convictions in how he says it…

So, let’s review …

In 2004, The College Dropout dissected the still-breathing body of hip-hop as a genre and a self-contained culture of fans and artists. The cutting and probing stretched and pinned the definition of what introspective, soulful depths of commentary mainstream audiences could readily embrace. Maybe more incredibly, he operated from the grand Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam platform with the blessing and tutelage of rap demigod Jay Z after previously dismissive underestimation by just about every other major label under the sun.

With 2005’s Late Registration, he demonstrated conclusively that the praise heaped upon The College Dropout was no fluke consequence of hype-driven novelty. To the contrary, it’s an ambitiously orchestrated album demonstrating Kanye’s attentive ear to the blending of structure, melody, timing, evocative Baroque-inspired arrangement, and their potential to exist comfortably alongside well-chosen samples topped with his biting, provocative commentary. It hinted that, by the time Kanye has put the last finishing touch on one album, something in his head is already plotting the course of the next so that he never falls to redundancy.

Some themes might carry through from album to album, the same way that people carry over parts of their pasts even as time, experience, and growth build ascending storeys onto an established foundation. We’re always, at some depth, the people we were “then”; we’re just “those” people, plus much more that we’ve become since.

His feet firmly planted by two earlier hit albums, Kanye’s Graduation is everything tonally that it says on the tin: a commencement, marking an end to his uphill climb to be as heralded as a rapper as he’d become as a producer. It celebrates every single thing that a three-year ascension into the limelight has made of him, but still looks at all that lies before him with a certain skepticism. Still, there are some touching nods to every footstep that propelled him forward, from sampling “Hustlers, that’s if you’re still livin’, get on down…” from Jay Z’s The Blueprint — an album that zeroed Roc-A-Fella’s radar even more intently upon Kanye as a producer – to the aptly titled “Homecoming”, a jubilant ode to his Chicago upbringing dressed in a Chris Martin chorus, and “Big Brother”, a touching acknowledgement that Jay by this point had become as much a valued friend as a mentor.

Way back in 2007, I met Graduation with initial disappointment. I’d been captivated by The College Dropout‘s uncompromising, self-effacing honesty. The grandeur of Late Registration overwhelmed me with an ambition to root hip-hop once more in the alchemy of musicality. Graduation isn’t quite so explicitly grounded to either. As I said before, Kanye detests repeating himself. Hence, he delivers here an anthemic “commencement” address that’s tonally reminiscent of U2’s grand visions of Zooropa or Pop, cut with synth and electronic exploration.

Of course, it’s never been the production of Kanye’s albums that’s sometimes left me cold. On those first listens, I confess to missing the lyrical forest for the trees and really losing the plot.
It should be widely accepted by now that Kanye never checks a certain self-aggrandizing coat at the door. It’s just that the varying lights between the rooms he enters can each strike it just so, bringing out strikingly contrasting highlights. “Champion” and the famed Daft Punk-biting “Stronger” both celebrate that he’s never for a second lost faith in his own steam to carry him. To his credit, he delivers both with engaging, charming flows and wit that’s infectiously lovable.

When I first gave the album a test drive, it actually struck me as decidedly repetitive. There’s a certain braggadocio that goes with all listenable hip-hop like wasabi goes with sushi. However, taken at face value, Kanye was starting to come across to me as being unable to just let go of rejections that he should’ve – in my blind eyes, anyway – come to grips with and moved on from by then. It didn’t seem to me then that he was really saying anything personally or societally as remotely compelling as his statements of The College Dropout or Late Registration.

I’ll even be honest: “Drunk & Hot Girls” is still a vapid waste of a Mos Def collaboration, while the Lil Wayne collaboration “Barry Bonds” strikes me as Kanye winning a bet with SOMEONE as to whether or not he had it in him to actually put together something completely lazy. C’mon. At least “New Workout Plan” and “Breathe In, Breathe Out” were fun.

Now? I get it. In all things in life, when we pick up one end of the stick, we’re stuck with the other end. Kanye always delivers his stories in compelling fashion – it’s just that he’s writing what he knows: his life, triumphs, travails & all. In reality, this was assessment on the state of his fame. Sometimes, it’s from a place of bemusement (Drunk & Hot Girls”) and others, a contemplative resting place (“I Wonder” or “Big Brother”). But as Jay himself said in the intro to The Blueprint, right or wrong, it’s just what he’s feeling at the time.
Best of all, everything once more feels tight, cohesive, and as though there’s no wasted motion at all. The two aforementioned dud tracks feel out-of-place largely because neither quite has all the earmarks of Kanye’s studio perfectionism. Still, the rest of the album is, once more, an easy-flowing progression that’s best heard in its entirety.

Once more, Kanye brought his best…even if it isn’t exactly flawless and sometimes felt as though it was retracing well-trodden paths. Is it sometimes pompous and wanting for the greater lessons that provoked so much thought with his first two albums? Sure.

Along the way, the album itself and Kanye’s perspectives on fame and notoriety crystalize another spiritual teaching: wabi-sabi. My mother was the one who first brought this ancient Japanese take before me. To summarize it very generally, it’s the concept of accepting and celebrating even the “imperfections” in everything. Are they really flaws? Or simply aspects that are dissonant from our own ingrained ideals? Often, if we look hard enough and realize that everything we say, do, and even see in others is but clear reflection of our own beliefs, ideals, and experiences and their impacts upon us, we see things in a fresh, fascinating light.
Remember, if one takes the yellow imperfection entirely from a Green Lantern’s power battery, the battery itself loses all power.

Next week, Kanye delivers something remarkable: a personal album of sparse production that takes one of music’s most overused production tools and finds new value in it. It’s the definition of “giving life back to music.”

Never dull your colors for someone else’s canvas, Kids.