Rating:
  Release Date: August 30, 2005
  Website: Kanye West Website
  Label: Roc-a-Fella

Kanye West “Late Registration” Album Review
I hate pretty much all of mainstream media’s hip-hop coverage. I feel that they trivialize its importance and significance. They write about hip-hop like it’s a fashion or a trend, not an evolving and expanding youth-based experience. Mainstream journalists focus on the music, or the dance, or the clothing, or the fashion … but they never seem to delve into the social factors that have existed over the past 30 or more years that have helped to create hip-hop and its appeal.

They don’t treat hip-hop like a culture. They treat it like a fad. But fads never remain, and never hold the possibilities of cultural or thought-based revolutions. Hip-hop does both.

I guess that’s why I smirked a little a couple weeks ago when I walked into 7-Eleven and saw the Aug 29, 2005 issue of Time Magazine. “Go ahead, Kanye,” I thought, “all up on the cover of Time.” That was until I read the script: “Hip-Hop’s Class Act: Defying the rules of rap, KANYE WEST goes his own way.” The “hip-hop’s class act” statement was enough to poke at my curiosity, so I flipped past the Hillary Clinton/ John McCain crap, ignored the oil fever graphic, and vaguely glanced at the photos of that sexy tennis player Maria something (you know, the one that be screaming all loud and aggressively) before arriving to page 54, which included a page-size picture of Kanye in a pretty pimp suit. “Why You Can’t Ignore Kanye. More GQ than gangsta, Kanye West is challenging the way rap thinks about race and class - and striking a chord with fans of all stripes.”

Great, I figured. Mainstream America has adopted Kanye as their poster boy. The living proof that there is some hope, that their fears about hip-hop do not apply to all rappers. Kanye West . the first rapper ever to be non-gangster. After all, that is mainstream America’s understanding of hip-hop, right? A bunch of gangsters and thugs and drug dealers making music? Now don’t get me wrong, I was glad Kanye made the cover of Time. Whether or not the article was real, it still was giving the culture a shed of positive light. But now everyone was going to look at Kanye as the only one, not even taking time to realize the hundreds of hip-hop artists over the past three decades that do not fit into this country’s limited view of what they really are or should be.

“Aiight”
Overall, the article was what hip-hop linguists might refer to as “aiight.” The reporter did an aiight job of bridging the gap between hip-hop and the readers of Time Magazine. But then again, that’s gotta be a hard thing to do. You can’t teach the masses everything they need to know about hip-hop in an eight-page article.

He did an aiight job of covering up what appeared to me to be a subtle disregard for hip-hop, but that may have only existed due to his attempts to reach the Time audience. Statements like, “in the end, Roc-A-Fella overcame its institutional bias against Polo shirts,” or “the result was a torrent of albums about the joys of acquisitiveness (bling, if you must), consequence-free violence and compliant women” appeared to show an attempt to poke fun at or discredit hip-hop, perhaps capitalizing on jokes or accepted assumptions of his readership.

However, the reporter did do a good job of sticking to an all-too-commonly-accepted view of the hip-hop audience, an example of what Bakari Kitwana might refer to as “old racial politics.” On page 57, the reporter went into what I feel is an under-researched rant about the hip-hop market: “Statistics consistently show that 70% of hip-hop is consumed by young white audiences, but a century of anecdotal evidence is similarly irrefutable: white kids think it’s cool to be black, which means the other 30% sets the trends and runs the show. With the market mired in thuggery, African-American consumers could chose to: a) propagate a nasty stereotype of themselves for white kids to pin their libidinous fantasies on; b) not care; c) start patronizing the danger-free, supernice, suberboring rappers at the liberal humanist fringe; or d) give up.”

This statement alone demonstrates a great example of how hip-hop culture and its cross-cultural appeal are mistunderstood. If we read any hip-hop studies, or listened to any underground hip-hop music, we might second-guess a few of these statements. Kitwana himself goes to great lengths in his book, “Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the new reality of race in America,” to show all the holes in the statistical system that deems white kids to be the vast majority of hip-hop music consumers. In addition, anyone who has ever listened to, say, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Black Thought, Com Sense, Nas, pretty much anyone from the Rhymesayers or Def Jux crews, anyone in the Living Legends crew . man, the list goes on and on, would realize that “rappers at the liberal humanist fringe” are anything but “danger-free, supernice” or “superboring.”

And how do you justify a statement as broad as “white kids think it’s cool to be black”? Maybe instead of brushing the surface, we could do a study into why white kids might think its cool to be black. Perhaps their heightened understanding and awareness caused by the restless racial environments in which they were raised make them realize the plight black people have had to go through in this country, and respect them for their ability to continually overcome such negativity. Perhaps as their own lives begin to mirror the same social and economic oppression experienced by blacks in this country, they begin to understand. Or maybe the fact that their parents were never around due to an increasingly splintered economy that forced them to work longer and harder days, coupled with steadily dropping opportunities in most fields of work and education, made white kids victim to the same problems that plagued the “black kids they want to be like” in previous generations. Honestly, I don’t know … but at least I don’t take the common and simplified belief that white kids think it’s cool to be a color. They have their own color, what kind of stupidity is that?

And I guess therein lies my problem with the mainstream’s coverage of hip-hop: It just brushes the surface, showing the people only what they want them to see, and in the process reinforces what Kitwana may again refer to as “old racial politics.” If you delve a little deeper, you may come to understand some things about how this country’s way of life has effected people in the last 30 years, and how those effects may lead to change in the future.

My complaints dealing with this mainstream acceptance of Kanye could have gone on and on . till something great happened. I guess it was only a couple days later when somebody at NBC dropped the ball and couldn’t cut Kanye off in time. Instead, the entire nation got to hear what he thought about our president, our administration, and our country’s problems with race and class discrimination. All of a sudden, I felt a huge swelling of pride. “Who’s you’re class act now, America?” Almost immediately after being hailed as “more GQ than gangsta,” Kanye ironically pointed out who the real gangsters are, to the whole world no less. I could just see the owners of Time Magazine kicking themselves. “I told you they were all trouble makers, Johnson!”

And thus, the importance of Kanye West. America sees Kanye as operating far away from rap’s usual guidelines or framework. But in reality, he does not. Kanye demonstrates a portion of hip-hop’s universalism that has previously been ignored or misunderstood by the mainstream. All of a sudden, hip-hop does not exist only for a certain type of people in the eyes of the majority. Kanye’s not a gangster. He didn’t grow up in the ghetto. As Chris Rock might say, “He speaks so well.” And he is a socially conscious, politically charged activist who’s not scared to point out the wrongs in our society. For hip-hop to transform into a cultural revolution, to present wisdom and strength to this country’s middle and lower classes, we’ve got to get past the belief that hip-hop can’t belong to rich kids, or “bourgeois blacks” (a term which I hate, hence the quotation marks), or white kids, or country boys, or old people, or foreigners … or anyone. Kanye’s current recognition alone could force some Americans to realize that hip-hop is not really what is portrayed in the media or packaged by record companies, but so much more inclusive and outreaching . beyond any of their imaginations.

Late Registration
As for “Late Registration,” I would have to call it a super-super-super dope record. The production is innovative and creative. The topics are relevant and thought-provoking. And I must say that Kanye has come along way with his rhyming. He actually sounds like a lyricist on this one, somebody who’s been flowing for years.

But the greatest part is his myriad topics, most of which relate to things not credited as part of hip-hop culture. Kanye demonstrates his contemplations with uncertainty (Heard ‘Em Say), ambition (Touch the Sky, Drive Slow), relationship troubles (Gold Digger), struggle (Bring Me Down, Diamonds from Sierra Leone), love (Roses, Hey Mama), success (We Major, Celebration), and addiction (Addiction), while simultaneously showing how these topics apply to the hip-hop culture despite their great distances from a gangster-type appeal.

My favorite track on the album was “Crack Music,” which most reviewers seem to have a different outlook on than I do. Most people seemed to view this as a song talking about how the majority American audience likes music about crack, or drugs, or violence. Although this may be part of it, I think it goes deeper than that. As Kanye emphasizes, “this the type of music that you make when you round that,” he gives a couple examples of how Reagan or Bush introduced drugs into the black communities, perhaps in an attempt to kill them or keep them high and out of the way. In any case, I believe Kanye is pointing out that this strategy backfired, instead producing a type of environment that helped to create hip-hop music, which has “become America’s addiction.” Or as Kanye preaches at the end of the song:

We took that shit, measured it and then cooked that shit
And what we gave back, was crack music
And now we ooze it, through they nooks and crannies
So our mommas ain’t got to be they cooks and nannies
And we gonna repo everything they ever took from grammy
Now the former slaves trade hooks, for Grammy’s
This dark diction, has become America’s addiction
Those who ain’t even black use it
We gonna keep bagging up this here, crack music

Overall, check out the album for sure. I’m running out of time to critique it word for word as usual, so check out some of my favorite verses below:

Heard ‘Em Say
They say that people in life are seasons
And anything that happen it’s for a reason
And niggas gun clapping they keep to squeezing
And gram keep praying and keep believing
In Jesus, and one day that you see him
Till they walk in his footsteps and try to be him
The devil is alive I feel him breathing
Claiming money is the key, so keep on dreaming
And put them lottery tickets just to tease us
My aunt Pam can’t them cigarettes down
So now my little cousin smoking them cigarettes now
His job try to claim that he too niggerish now
Is it cause his skin blacker than liquorish now?

Touch the Sky
Before anybody wanted K-West beats
Me and my girl split the buffet at KFC
Dog, I was having nervous breakdowns
Like “Man - these niggas that much better than me?”
Baby, I’m going on an airplane
And I don’t know if I’ll be back again
Sure enough, I sent the plane tickets
But when she came to kick it, things became different
Any girl I cheated on, sheets I skeeted on
Couldn’t keep it home, thought I needed a Nia Long
I’m trying to right my wrongs
But its funny them same wrongs helped me write this song

Gold Digger
18 years, 18 years
She got one of yo kids got you for 18 years
I know somebody paying child support for one of his kids
His baby momma’s car and crib is bigger than his
You will see him on TV Any Given Sunday
Win the Superbowl and drive off in a Hyundai
She was supposed to buy your shorty TYCO with your money
She went to the doctor got lypo with your money
She walking around looking like Michael with your money
Should of got that insured got GEICO for your money
If you ain’t no punk holla We Want Prenup
WE WANT PRENUP!, Yeaah
It’s something that you need to have
Cause when she leave yo ass she gone leave with half
18 years, 18 years
And on her 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his

Crack Music
How we stop the Black Panthers?
Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer
You hear that, what Gil Scott is Heron
When our heroes or heroines got hooked on heroin
Crack, raised the murder rate in D.C. and Maryland
We, invested in that, it’s like we got Merrill Lynched
And we been hanging from the same tree, ever since
Sometimes I feel the music is the only medicine
So we, cook it, cut it, measure it, bag it
Sell it, the fiends, cop it, nowadays they can’t tell if that’s that good shit
We ain’t sure man
Put the CD on your tongue, yeah that’s pure man

Who gave Saddam anthrax?
George Bush got the answers
Back in the hood it’s a different type of chemical
Arm & Hammer baking soda raised they own quota
Right when our soldiers, ran for the stove cause
Cause, dreams of being Hova
Went from bein a broke man
T to bein a dopeman
T to bein the President, look there’s hope man

Roses
Tell her everything gonna be fine, but I be lying
Her family crying, they want her to live, and she trying
I’m arguing like what kind of doctor can we fly in
You know the best medicine go to people that’s paid
If Magic Johnson got a cure for AIDS
And all the broke muh’fuckers passed away
You telling me if my grandma’s in the NBA
Right now she’d be okay?

Bring Me Down
You see, if you even wanted to ever be anything
There’d always be somebody that shoot down any dream
There’ll always be haters, that’s the way it is
Hater niggas marry hater bitches and have hater kids
But they gonna have to take my life ‘fore they take my drive
‘Cause when I was barely living, that’s what kept me alive
Just the thought that maybe it could be better than what we at at this time
Make it out of this grind, ‘fore I’m out of my mind

Addiction
What’s your addiction? Is it money? Is it girls? Is it weed?
I’ve been afflicted, by not one, not two, but all three
She’s got the same thing, about me, but more, about us
And she’s coming over, so I guess, that means, I’m her drugs

I see the emotion, in your eyes, that you tried, not to show
We get the closest, when you high, or you drunk, or you blowed

Diamonds from Sierra Leone
Good morning, this ain’t Vietnam still
People lose hands, legs, arms, fo’ real
Little was known on Sierra Leone
And how it connect to the diamonds we own

See, a part of me sayin’, “Keep shinin’”
How? When I know what a blood diamond’s
Though it’s thousands of miles away
Sierra Leone connect to what we go through today
Over here it’s a drug trade, we die from drugs
Over there they die from what we buy from drugs
The diamonds, the chains, the bracelets, the charmses
I thought my Jesus piece was so harmless
‘Til I seen a picture of a shorty armless
And here’s the conflict

Hey Mama
Forest Gump momma said, life was like a box of chocolates
My momma told me go to school, get your doctorate
Something to fall back on, you can profit with
But still supported me when I did the opposite
Now I feel like there’s things I gotta get, things I gotta do
Just to prove to you, you was getting through