West’s latest album is a reflection of life

The rapper 50 Cent said he’ll quit if his new album doesn’t outsell West’s.

By GREG KOT

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

CHICAGO — Kanye West was sipping a mixed drink through a straw, and his loose tongue was even friskier than usual. The occasion was a listening party a few days ago at a Chicago recording studio for his third album, “Graduation” (Good Music), due out Tuesday.

West has already written, performed and produced two multimillion-selling albums, “The College Dropout” (2004) and “Late Registration” (2005), but he is not satisfied. For him, music is a Darwinian eat-or-be-eaten competition, and not just because record sales, and hip-hop sales in particular, are plummeting. Billboard reports that rap is down 44 percent since 2000, and 33 percent this year.

So Tuesday is viewed as D-Day for rap’s resurgence. Not only is West’s album out that day, so is “Curtis,” the third album from another hip-hop artist who used to move big numbers, 50 Cent.

In a bit of chest-thumping sales promotion, 50 Cent has said he’ll quit if he doesn’t outsell West. At the listening party, West wouldn’t take the bait. “Fifty is one of the good rappers,” he said. “He can’t retire.”

Instead, the 30-year-old artist who grew up on the South Side picked a good-natured fight with Justin Timberlake.

“He was the No. 1 black artist” last year, said West, who is not colorblind, just envious of the singer’s crossover success. Like Timberlake, West wants kids, teens, hipsters, nerds, moms, dads and grandparents all dancing to his music.

“People like [Timberlake],” West declared. “People don’t like me.”

The audience of a few dozen listeners laughed, then West amended himself. “People either hate me or they love me, because I say what I feel.”

Raw intimacy

No argument here. West rarely filters what’s on his mind, and he infuses his ultra-savvy pop ingenuity with a raw intimacy unusual for a mainstream star. That proclivity for saying exactly what he feels also makes him a lightning rod for controversy.

Last year at the MTV Europe Video Music Awards, West bum-rushed the stage and threw a hissy fit when he didn’t win for best video. In 2005, he watched footage from the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans while hosting a benefit concert on live national television. After giving an impassioned, off-the-cuff assessment of the heart-breaking images, he blurted out, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

West’s polarizing bluntness is also the key to his success. He’s every bit as tough on himself as he is on the U.S. president. In the opening verse of one of his best new songs, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” West assesses the state of his world: “I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny/And what I do? Act more stupidly.”

If “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” was something of a confounding single when released several months ago, with its downbeat tone and angry vocal, it makes perfect sense tucked inside the album. It sits in the middle of “Graduation,” the centerpiece of a journey from late adolescence to adulthood that becomes progressively darker.

Wearing his flaws rather than brushing past them, West is at his best, never more so than on the closing “Big Brother.” It’s the only song on the album where the music feels strictly like a backdrop, a gray wash that exists solely to frame West’s rap. Even as he pays tribute to the hip-hop mogul who put him on the map, Jay-Z, he recounts the slights and embarrassments he suffered at his hands.