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about why I'm feeling especially nostalgic about this album as the 10th creeps up:
For me, it wasn't so much the formative years as it was a mainstream rap album I REALLY liked (or at least listened to a LOT), and back then that's not really so easy to come by. For me at that time it was basically one a year (at the time I wouldn't call what Eminem was doing "mainstream" for example) - Blueprint, Lord Willin, Get Rich or Die Tryin', College Dropout - until 2005 when the tides started to shift and the big hit albums were more my style for a little bit. But College Dropout bridged that gap between what still sounded underground and exclusive in a mostly pre-internet, totally pre-Youtube era and what still made for really catchy, enjoyable, digestible pop music.
Kanye also cleared the way for rappers who were more blatantly being sold as comedians as much as wordsmiths. No one put their fists to their mouths and jumped up and down screaming "oooooooooh!" to "got a dark-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson / Got a light skin friend look like Michael Jackson" the way they did to the "god damn she fine but she party all the time!" antics of Jay-Z's "Girls, Girls, Girls", but we probably shouldn't have been so blind to Kanye's ability to deliver songs balancing that line between comical lark and social satire over and over again.
Thinking back on this album in the weekend leading up to its 10th anniversary (really Def Jam, no attempt to cash in with a huge retrospective box including mastered Good Ass Job mixtapes most Kanye fans probably haven't heard and what not? Can someone get me a line to their office?) it's most striking to me just how compelling the idea of it was. It's hard to remember now in a post-irony, post-Graduation world, but there was a time when pop rap was mostly really bad, gangsta rap was struggling to express itself from within the confines of the major studio system and underground rap was fractioning off into both boom bap purism and abstract dismantling of the form's very foundation. And them, you know, The Ummah or whatever.
College Dropout - and I think even at the time it felt capable of doing this - helped put an end to all that. You could put a song like "Jesus Walks" ten minutes ahead of "The New Workout Plan" and it could make sense. You could do drug dealer raps like "We Don't Care" and gather-round-the-dinner table testimonial like "Family Business" as album bookends and be confident the listener would feel like they were walking out the same door they came in. There had been good-to-great balancing acts in hip-hop before, but to my ears no one made that more palpable with a single release than Kanye with this here. To an awkward high school freshman who loved Black on Both Sides and Get Rich or Die Tryin' in near-equal measure, The College Dropout quickly became my everything.
Re-listening to it now (iTunes is registering 0 plays for all tracks, meaning I probably haven't listened to this album since May 22 2009 when I first scored it for the handbook) I can't help but realize how nostalgic this album was for me. Kanye's verse on "Get 'Em High" was one of my very first "I MUST learn this whole thing!" moments, and yes I already knew what 36 Chambers and The Blueprint sounded like. I wanted to know that verse. "Family Business" was the first beat that caught me flabbergasted by how pretty a hip-hop song can be, the way "I Got 5 on It" or "Ambitionz az a Ridah" taught me music can let its nuts hang as low as the gangsta-est rappers. I got to hear Ludacris and Mos Def on the same album, which at the time was all I ever wanted. Talib Kweli created an Okayplayer lurker and eventual addict out of me with a single line.
I could probably go on for another two or three paragraphs, about my memories for each individual song or how weird it seems to be listening to this album while looking at my old scores for it. Instead, I just want to say thanks to Kanye. And read this: (http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/5893976/kanye-wests-the-college-dropout-an-oral-history,Billboard: Kanye West's College Dropout - An Oral History).
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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