Word: dropouts
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When West finally got a deal (in the end, Roc-A-Fella overcame its institutional bias against Polo shirts), he shattered the myth that he was too soft, too weird and too bourgeois to fit the mold of a platinum-selling rapper. His 2004 debut album, The College Dropout, went nearly triple platinum, topped all the major critics' polls, earned 10 Grammy nominations and made rap accessible to audiences that hadn't paid attention in years. "That record restored my faith in hip-hop," says Jamie Foxx, who lent comic vocals to West's No. 1 hit Slow Jamz...
...Quest and LL Cool J successfully wove suburban perspectives into rebellious music, but when gangsta rap arrived, nuance was smothered by a blanket of extreme poses. Tupac Shakur, once a student at the Baltimore School for the Arts, died with THUG LIFE tattooed across his torso. On The College Dropout, West found a way to bridge the divide without self-destruction. His follow-up, Late Registration, arrives Aug. 30 and continues to mix race and class with beats and melodies. It is widely expected to be the biggest-selling record of the year--1.6 million copies will be shipped...
...College Dropout was 76 minutes of someone cramming every thought he'd ever had about himself into rhyme. It was immaculately produced, but what made it compelling was the contradictions. The song Jesus Walks mixed spirituality with skepticism and rap with gospel. All Falls Down slammed the "single black female addicted to retail" but concluded with West admitting, "I wanna act ballerific, like it's all terrific/ I got a couple past due bills, I won't get specific/ I got a problem with spending before I get it/ We all self-conscious, I'm just the first to admit...
...didn't take long for The College Dropout to develop coattails. Fashion-wise, you may have been blinded recently by the swarm of pink Polo shirts, while on the charts, West's friends John Legend, an R&B singer with a University of Pennsylvania degree, and Common, a whip-smart and austere Chicago rapper, both had sales spikes. West's Late Registration should push things further. "I didn't want to play it boring and safe," says West while sitting in the balcony of a 14th century church in Prague, one of the locations he hand-picked for the video...
...Commandments) and Jay-Z (Rap Game/ Crack Game)--excellent rappers with a shrewd eye for journalistic detail but, to put it bluntly, ex--drug dealers. "Rap changed a lot in the last few years," notes comedian and hip-hop fan Chris Rock, who says he listens to The College Dropout while he writes jokes. "In the early days, the best rappers weren't necessarily from the hood. Run-D.M.C. was from Hollis [Queens, N.Y.]. Eric B and Rakim were from Long Island. They lived next to the hood...