![]() The College Dropout and Late Registration sold a combined 7 million copies in the U.S., but 50 Cent’s own first two albums, Get Rich or Die Trying and The Massacre, sold nearly 14 million, almost exactly twice as much. While Kanye West’s decisive triumph over 50 seems inevitable in retrospect, it’s easy to forget how much of an underdog he was at the time. The two frenemies appeared together on the cover of Rolling Stone and at the VMAs, and it seemed like a perfect battle for the soul of mainstream hip-hop – tough New York gangsterism vs. When Graduation and 50 Cent’s Curtis were scheduled for the same release date on September 11, 2007, the media whipped up a sales war. But West’s lyrics, a Chicago-centric riff on Common’s “I Used To Love H.E.R.,” are more or less unchanged.ĥ0 Cent had sold nearly twice as many albums as Kanye West before losing their famous sales showdown ![]() The most prominent instance is “Homecoming,” which takes its verses from “Home,” a College Dropout outtake that appeared on his 2002 mixtape Get Well Soon….The original beat and John Legend hook are replaced with a completely new track and chorus featuring Coldplay’s Chris Martin. Kanye West created a voluminous catalog of demo and mixtape tracks in the early days of his transition from buzzing producer to superstar rapper, and lines from those songs were often revised and reused throughout his first three albums. Kanye released an early version of “Homecoming” nearly five years earlier To celebrate the album’s 10th anniversary, here are some things you may not know about Graduation. This focused collection of 13 songs touched on his complex relationships with fame, his father, his hometown of Chicago and his “big brother” Jay-Z and leaped into the world of experimental art via the Takashi Murikami album cover. But, 10 years later, we can see how it also pointed the way towards the AutoTuned vocals, EDM and arena rock influences that would help define the next decade in rap. A powerful aura.When Kanye West released Graduation on September 11, 2007, it was the candy-colored, beatwise album that, famously, beat 50 Cent for a battle over release date bragging rights. But he is very intense, super intense, always looking at the way others are creating, wanting to learn. Murakami answered, "Oh, really? Wow, I never thought of that. In July 2015, when interviewing Murakami for the cover of Juxtapoz, we remarked that the Graduation artwork was what really turned Kanye into an almost mega-alter-ego, that he took his artistry and bravado to a whole new level behind the guise of Takashi's art. I too wanted to be swept up and spun around in that tornado." Kanye's music scrapes sentimentality and aggressiveness together like sandpaper, and he uses his grooves to unleash this tornado that spins with the zeitgeist of the times. It's also occasionally a place where you experience the rigid dogma of the human race. It's a place of dreams, of righteousness, a place to have fun. Murakami, at the time, via a Wikipedia entry, said "The cover is based on Kanye's theme of student life. Both were to become larger-than-life after this. Right about this time, Murakami himself opened the landmark ©MURAKAMI show at MOCA in Los Angeles, which again felt like the perfect artistic star alignment. Kanye's "Dropout Bear" went from shy little mascot and blasted into hyper-color, hyper-surreal galaxy of superstardom. ![]() The colorful, surreal, out-of-this-world artwork matched Kanye's stadium-sized hip-hop tracks. Reading this through the lens of how famous both are in the cultural realm, from fashion to music to art to celebrity, it's important to underscore the enormity of this most important collaboration in both their careers. So Kanye enlisted another budding cultural icon who had already rattled the contemporary art world, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, to brand and recreate the image of Kanye West Megastar. ![]() Sky-rocketing fame would come together with Graduation, for Kanye, already a Grammy-winning producer, artist, and budding cultural and style icon, fresh off 2005's highly acclaimed Late Registration. ![]() It's amazing to think back to 2007 and what Kanye West meant to pop-culture and pop music, because so much has changed in the 12 years since. Many popular album covers become iconic pieces of pop art, and they're a great excuse for us to share some favorites along with the visual components that make an album memorable.Īugust 23, 2019: Kanye West, Graduation (September 11, 2007) Our weekly segment, Juxtapoz Sound and Vision, explores a piece of substantial album artwork every Sunday to look at one of the primary ways musicians and visual artists collaborate. ![]()
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