When I wrote about The College Dropout, I talked about trying to balance my opinions of the artist today, & my understanding of where it fits in his catalog, with my experience of the album when it first came out. I will do the same here, in large part because I really don't want to talk about 2022 Kanye. After loving the debut & appreciating the musical moves he'd made since then, I was excited for Late Registration. I enjoyed the album & played it a lot during the autumn after it came out, but after a while it started to feel a little less fresh, a little less special than The College Dropout. Although it had plenty of stone-cold classics on it, it occasionally felt like it was trying to recreate its predecessor.
In the previous writeup I said that Kanye made songs, not beats, & that continues to hold true here. Multi-part compositions like "Crack Music" & "Gone" are multiple times more complex than your average sample-loop rap song. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, naturally.) But on this album, rather than compose new sections, occasionally Ye settles for adding a new melody in the back half of the song. He does this enough times ("Heard 'Em Say," "Gold Digger," "Hey Mama," etc.) that it starts to feel like a worn-out trick.
The other thing that seems to be emerging on this album is Kanye's ego. He wasn't exactly self-effacing on The College Dropout, but at least he defaulted to humility, & the cockier moments seemed in keeping with (or tribute to) hiphop's time-honored braggadocio. On this album, especially songs like "Addiction" & "Celebration," there's a tone of sneering contempt that starts to creep in toward the people (particularly women) he considers himself better than. (Once again, I will leave any conclusions about how this relates to today's Kanye up to the reader's interpretation.)
Of course, there are 3 absolutely indispensable songs on here. "Touch the Sky" is the only beat not produced by Ye, a sunny Just Blaze number sampling the great Curtis Mayfield, & the breakthrough feature for a young Lupe Fiasco. "Drive Slow" features frequent Kanye ghostwriter GLC & the always-affable Paul Wall, & rides one of the greatest beats of the 2000s, with Kanye flipping the same Hank Crawford sample that Johnny "J" used on 2Pac's "Shorty Wanna Be a Thug." When I first heard "Drive Slow," I was mad at Kanye for biting 2Pac, but listening further I had to admit that his flip was better, complete with the added instruments & a syrupy skrewed section at the end in honor of Paul Wall's Houston.
The 3rd, & best, of this album's golden trio is "Gone," featuring Cam'ron, whom I never liked more than here, & Consequence (another ghostwriter) delivering the best verse on the whole album. But the main attraction is the beat: starting as a simple Otis Redding chop, it evolves through added instruments (love those strings!) into an instrumental section midway through, a deft modulation/key change & emerges into a bolder variation in the back half. I love key changes in rap songs & there aren't enough of them--at least, not enough produced by people not named Kanye West.
So Late Registration is by no means a bad album, but it lacks the staying power of the records that came before & after it. For an artist who prides himself on continuously innovating, this is the only time in Kanye's career when things have started to feel a little stale musically.
No comments:
Post a Comment