‘The College Dropout’ by Kanye West turns 18, so we rank his discography

Image Credit: @wraithgallery

Today is the day that marks 18 years since the artist formerly known as Kanye West dropped The College Dropout. How does it stack up to his current work?

Ye, formerly Kanye West, is one of the most prolific and successful artists of our time. With 22 Grammys and a discography chock-full of hits, the Chi-town rapper has sparked heated debates about how his albums stack up since he called out the Grammys for snubbing Beyoncé. While ranking music, or any art form for that matter, will always be subjective I’d like to rank up Ye’s work in honor of the album many consider to be his magnum opus.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

This album is widely regarded as Ye’s best, blending a completely new sound of auto-tuned voices layering empowering choruses behind poignant and heavy-hitting bars on the front half of the track. This is the beginning of a journey from soothing melodies to proclamations of America’s hypocrisies to piano and violin harmonies that have never been replicated to the same effect.

The instruments found here are unexpected but fresh. MBDTF is full of textures and sounds that contribute so cohesively to the overall cohesiveness of the album’s structure that it sends its listeners into a lucid trance- floating through the album’s echoing themes.

808s & Heartbreak

While My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy may be Ye’s most complete album, 808s is the one that changed everything. This album was Ye’s most experimental record that worked the best, it brought new sounds into music and was Ye’s first album collab with Kid Cudi. The record’s tracks feel like an experience of Ye’s mind with Kid Cudi and Ye himself alongside you to help guide you through the darkness and the light.

Graduation

Graduation is one of those albums that just feels so damn good. This is one of three albums Kanye West has dropped that had an undeniable and lasting impact on the music industry so strong that it changed how every artist was thinking about their own music. This album was Kanye’s proclamation that he made it to the good life, that nobody could tell him how to feel or be. It’s full of classic Ye beats over some of the artist’s best wordplay with a marked improvement in his melodies.

Kids See Ghosts

The only thing holding this album back from ranking higher is its length, which is a bit of a conundrum because it’s also part of what makes the album so great. This is perhaps Kanye’s most cohesive and consistent work, which marks a trend with his musical collaborations including Kid Cudi.

Kids See Ghosts has cutting bars from Pusha T alongside spacey and distant vocals from Kid Cudi over what is some of the best sound production Kanye West has ever put out. West was absolutely hitting his stride with his wordplay and rhyme schemes on this record with lyrics that flowed together with ease as the songs transitioned between deep and basey drums to cutting guitar backdrops underneath one of Kanye’s biggest evolutions to his melodies on tracks like ‘Freeee’.

This is an album that makes floating feel like something you’ve been doing your whole life.

Late Registration

Kanye West’s second studio album marks one of the artist’s best— chronicling his early life, what it meant to him, how he plans to take on the future, and what he means for the people coming up behind him. Late Registration is a perfectly cyclical loop of being inspired and inspiring others, and my personal favorite of Ye’s discography. It features some of the most iconic skits ever put to an album and will you take you soaring up, with aspirations of hope for the future, and crashing down, with somber memories of the past.

The Life of Pablo

The Life of Pablo really put Kanye back on the map after the disappointment fans felt from the last few projects before this one, as well as the turmoil surrounding this project leading up to its release. Low and behold, when the project did finally come together, it featured some of Kanye’s best work including what might possibly be his greatest song in ‘Ultralight Beam.’ Featuring club bangers and angelic harmonies alike, The Life of Pablo marked Kanye’s return to artistic greatness amidst the turmoil surrounding his life in the media.

Watch the Throne

Jay-Z and Kanye’s first album-length collaboration is all everyone expected it to be— pure entertainment. With two giants of the rap game trading bars on every track, Watch the Throne becomes an enjoyable listen on that merit alone. This is accompanied by Kanye’s always stellar production which rounds out to be one of Ye’s most fun albums to listen to date.

The College Dropout

The album that started it all just turned 18 today. While it doesn’t have the same grandiose production and bold leaps some of his later albums have, The College Dropout doesn’t need that to be as good as it is.

Featuring choir vocals and cheery instrument backdrops, there is a reason Ye’s freshman album put him on the map in a big way, on top of this Kanye speaks truth to power in his rhymes— calling out former employers, nonsense he found within America’s education system, Reagan era politics, and the injustices of the system he lives in. That doesn’t stop Kanye West from having fun either, giving advice for those looking to get in shape and giving his most impressive performance as a rapper when he literally raps through the wire.

ye

ye is definitely West’s darkest record as we saw the Chicago native address the topic of his own mental health on the seven-song track. Marking his journey into Colorado as he went through the diagnoses of his bipolar disorder, ye delves into regions of West’s mind that we never thought we’d see. This album is possibly Ye’s most vulnerable and open and released along with one of West’s most prolific Summers in which he released his collab with Kid Cudi on Kids See Ghosts and produced Pusha T’s Daytona, Teyana Taylor’s K.T.S.E., and Nas’ Nasir.

Although each project was relatively short, they each had a cohesiveness and artistic style that enabled them to succeed beyond expectations. The only reason ye ranks so far below Kids See Ghosts is the immaculate production and layering of sounds found on the latter, although, there are no blatant dips in quality on the former.

Donda

Ye’s newest album was received positively among fans and is his longest album to date. As with many of his albums, Donda was surrounded by confusion and controversy leading up to its release, leading many of West’s fans to become disenfranchised. Disregarding everything surrounding the album and just focusing on the music, you’ll find that Ye has once again delivered.

While Donda isn’t as cohesive or fleshed out as many of the albums above it on this list (with the possible exception of The Life of Pablo), it certainly has highlights that are much better than any of his work below. Donda features a lot of good and great songs that don’t quite fit together all that well but shine when they stand by themselves.

Yeezus

In many ways, Yeezus marks the transition from Ye’s ‘old Kanye’ to ‘new Kanye’. While many fans felt let down by this almost-ambitious record, there are still highlights worth noting- the discussion of lynching in Jim Crow America and tokenism in modern America’s corporate world among them. The biggest failure of this project was trying to recreate what 808s & Heartbreaks did instead of finding its own footing and breaking its own boundaries.

Jesus is King

Jesus is King marks the first album after West’s announcement that he will no longer be making secular music and will now be featuring the gospel much more heavily in his songs. This was controversial among his fans as not all held his same beliefs, especially with the scrapping of his highly anticipated album Yandhi.

While the production quality on this record is among some of Kanye’s best, the thematic content and lyricism are probably his worst. West’s lyrics on this track come off as all of the following: corny, self-prosecuting, blasphemous, and unaware. Ye compares his own prosecution to that of Jesus Christ himself in ‘Selah’ and has some of his silliest lyrics to date in ‘Closed on Sunday’.

Despite his disappointing lyricism in Jesus is King, West’s sound quality and production, one of his biggest strengths across any album, is undeniably great with grande sound layerings that build over time and fantastic fusions of techno elements with gospel sounds. Overall, Jesus is King feels like the most low-effort record Kanye has released but only because of the high bar he himself set for his fans.

Future work from Kanye West

Donda 2 is just around the corner and according to Kanye West should be arriving on February 22nd, 2022. If you’re interested in the leaked tracklisting check here.

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Ross Cutsforth