Timeline of Sounds
Kanye West’s Impossible Album
Graduation
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In the music video for “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” towards the end, an expensive car drifts across a barren desert landscape while the song’s sampled Young Jeezy ad-lib’s echo over the beat’s fractured burst of sound:
I’m serious / I got / money
And I think it is easy to look back now and see this as some kind of commentary on how fame and riches alone won’t bring you closer to any kind of shared humanity with those you may love but feel distant from, or those you may love and have outlasted. But then again, it is what it is: an expensive car, kicking up sand. A video as rich and haunting as the song’s sonic landscape would suggest it should be. With headphones on, if I close my eyes while the song is playing, I feel the desert beneath my feet.
Graduation was the last album that Kanye West could make look easy. He hasn’t made an album look easy ever since, and there are a number of reasons for that — grief, fame, perhaps boredom pushing him into new creative territory quicker with each year — but there is something sort of magical about West’s first three album run that, in retrospect, seems entirely singular…
