Remember when Kanye took us to church? This was 2005, before he was conflating his name with Jesus’s, back when he was content to jump out from behind a pew wearing a black suit and a wide white satin tie and rap the entirety of “Jesus Walks,” begging for guidance and forgiveness in front of God and the Grammys.

It wasn’t that “Jesus Walks”-era Kanye was any humbler than the iterations that would follow, but much of College Dropout is about explicitly defining and systematically disabling the expectations and structures he’d defy once successful. It’s about rapping If I talk about God my record won’t get played, huh? and then a year later constructing a black church setpiece onstage at music’s biggest awards ceremony, complete with a preacher, hymnals, and stained glass.

ADVERTISEMENT

At its heart, College Dropout is an act of defiance, or more accurately, an act of many defiances—a blueprint for the kind of large-scale drama we now expect from Kanye, and a foreshadowing of the kind of wokeness and outspokeness we now demand from pop icons.

Much of the album’s lyricism reacts directly to the gauzy gangster mythology that pervaded successful early 2000s rap. College Dropout isn’t about calling out individuals as much as systems, and Kanye addresses this directly on “We Don’t Care.” Asked to do a “beautiful song” for “this kids’ graduation,” Ye instead crafts a devastating picture of the underfunded programs and government mismanagement that set the lower class up for failure. When you stop the programs for after school/ And they DCFS, some of ‘em dyslexic/ They favorite 50 Cent song “12 Questions.” Having given up on systemic reform, Dropout finds strength in its uncomfortable honesty, in being a hard pill coated in the sweetest candy.

ADVERTISEMENT

Contrastingly, tracks like “Slow Jamz” and “The New Workout Plan” keep the album from hewing too close to Mos and Kweli (prolly). Against a modest but pounding beat on “Breathe In Breathe Out”—no Harlem Boys Choir here—Kanye brags about “money hoes and rims again,” about getting head while driving some girl back to her car in the shittiest parts of Chicago. It’s a track that apologizes for contributing more of that bullshit ice rap, before smiling and delivering some of the nastiest verses on the whole album.

On College Dropout, Kanye hadn’t yet anointed himself a saint, hadn’t yet earned the kind of artistic credibility that allows him to stage his albums in stadiums with choreography by Vanessa Beecroft as Twitter waits with bated breath. But it’s a vision of that future, the template for that kind of greatness. Beyond his verbal dexterity, his impeccable production, Kanye’s hyper-perceptive intelligence is his biggest strength as a rapper. And while it can be dizzying to follow his back and forth, his lapses and prayers for forgiveness, there’s nowhere that awareness is bigger or more evident than on College Dropout, The Best Debut Album Of All Time. —Liz Raiss