If you’re still wondering how Kanye West powers through seemingly insurmountable controversies month after month, consider his beginnings: he gets by on the very same combination of talent and tenacity that made him a household name. In keeping with his headstrong ethos and nigh inhuman work ethic, the same accident that shattered his jaw was the one that inspired his smash-hit debut single.Įlsewhere, West faced similar roadblocks – peer skepticism, contract issues and label disputes – with the same zeal. The road to The College Dropout was a treacherous one, a fact best illustrated by the car crash that landed West – then a successful but hardly famous producer – in the hospital. Things didn’t get any easier after he signed to the Roc as a solo artist in mid-to-late 2002. The album was the culmination of West’s entire pre-release career, one spent crafting “five beats a day for three summers,” learning at the hands of Chicago veteran and personal mentor No I.D.
West wasn’t just stockpiling beats, however: he was saving lyrics and lines, bars he’d scrawled on notepads and spat into mics alongside his early outfit, Go-Getters. Then maybe he stop savin’ all the good beats for himself…” They expected that College Dropout to drop and then flop It’s a fact he alluded to on “ Last Call,” The College Dropout’s epic twelve-minute album closer: “There’s beats on the album he’s been literally saving for himself for years.” Again, West was prepared: A&R John Monopoly remembers that even early on, Ye “was always producing with the intention of being a rapper.” This meant that from the very beginning, West engaged with his beats as a songwriter, allowing him to shelf his favourites for his seemingly inevitable debut. In an interview with David Letterman, Jay recalled the famously confident artist interrupting a studio session and declaring himself “the Savior of Chicago.” In order to prove it to the rest of us, however, Ye would have to make an album. The first 41 days of 2004 were particularly special, then, because the sun was setting on West’s productive obscurity: though he’d long been a purveyor of beats for Roc-A-Fella, the mild spotlight of the A-list producer would soon give way to the fully-fledged gaze of fame. Though he had no small number of nicknames and honorifics – Jay himself had shouted out “Kanyeezy,” calling him “a genius,” on The Black Album’s “Lucifer” – West was hardly the titanic force of pop culture with which we’re all familiar. Just… different.ĭifferent too was Kanye West, then little more than a name gracing the liner notes of the young millennium’s most acclaimed records. Things were different in 2004: 50 Cent was a musical titan, Jay-Z had retired from the rap game and Donald Trump was endorsing the Eminem/Slim Shady ticket in the election.
Fifteen years on, we’re breaking down the sampling on Ye’s triumphant debut and talking about the creation of a classic.
It’s hard to imagine the world without Kanye West, and it’s hard to imagine Kanye West without The College Dropout.
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