“This Sucks!” Late Registration, 20 Years Later
by Jenny Sequoia, Contributor
Illustration by Amit
On the 13th of February, 2005, a young Kanye West stood onstage at the 47th annual Grammy Awards. By all accounts, Kanye was on top of the world. He had sold 441,000 records within the first week of the release of his debut album The College Dropout, achieved a Billboard Number 1 single with “Slow Jamz,” and now had the most prestigious award in music—a Grammy for Best Rap Album—firmly within his hands. He clearly had the skill to hang with industry greats, a skill he would refine further in August of 2005 when he released his sophomore LP Late Registration. He also had an eccentric personality, as was evident in his Grammy acceptance speech, as he declared “Everybody wants to know what I would do if I didn’t win… I guess we’ll never know.”
The beauty of a retrospective analysis like this is that we do, in fact, know what happens when Kanye West does not win. Said eccentric personality has caught up to him in the past five years, for as ubiquitous as his name is with two legendary decades of Rap history, it is now equally ubiquitous with a string of bad decisions, public freakouts, and baffling “career moves.” We’ve all seen pictures of Kanye wearing a MAGA hat while shaking hands with a dementia-ridden fascist, we’ve all heard news about his brazenly antisemitic behavior and remarks, and we all bore witness to his laughable 2020 Presidential bid. At this point, Kanye West is so far beyond parody that we are left to wonder when, how, and why he fell into the alt-right pipeline, and if he could ever climb back from its depths.
To find an answer, we return to what I consider his best project, Late Registration. Fresh off of his prior success, West threw his newfound conviction into even more powerful and soulful tracks, with production highlights including the sublime “We Major”, “Touch the Sky”, and “Late”. His storytelling abilities are on overdrive, showcased on contemplative tracks like “Drive Slow”, where West references car culture as a metaphor for growing up too fast, and “Roses”, a gorgeously told anecdote about his family’s reunion in the wake of his grandmother’s illness . We see in this selection of songs that thematic concepts in Late Registration are those of family, authority, pride, and a hunger to grow. Arguably the best music Kanye ever put out was built from ground up with the perspective of a lower-class man attempting to climb the social ladder, reflecting on the experiences he's had and lessons they've taught him, all while attempting to stay close to his family roots. There are also a number of anti-establishment themes that emerge throughout the album, as he critiques academia, the rich, and the systemic racism baked into every aspect of American Society.
The issue is that Kanye West had ascended to the status of a God within the rap scene. Once his homegrown style and mass appeal elevated him to the economic class he once berated, he began to lose his original spark. He managed to remain grounded through his mother Donda West, his emotional rock and greatest supporter throughout both his upbringing and adult life. He writes about her in Late Registration on the track “Hey Mama”, expressing his love for her and pride in how hard she’s worked for his sake .
As fate would have it, that final tie would be severed on the 10th of November, 2007, when Donda West died of coronary artery disease after a botched cosmetic surgery. Kanye West would never fully recover from this; his mother dying cut his last tie to the person he once was, leaving him defenseless against his own volatile mind. We all know the story from here: Clothing brands, manic episodes , disastrous album rollouts, and a disgraceful fall from the limelight. And as this tragic whirlwind of a life contrasted with the earnest, soulful sounds of Late Registration upon my relisten, I could only muster one thought.
This Sucks!
I can't possibly emphasize just how much this absolutely, positively sucks! There are no words for this type of tragedy! I hate watching an immensely talented person fall into such disarray. At the same time, you can’t excuse this behavior in spite of his talents, because the things he says and does undeniably and irreversibly taint his music! Artistic creation is an action; if it's impossible to separate Kayne’s current actions from his past actions, it’s impossible to separate his current actions from his past music. It’s an ethical line that I feel cannot be denied, which leaves us in this awful, uncomfortable grey area in the discourse about an influential and important musical figure.
Until the end of time, this ethical barrier to entry will be placed at the front doors of Kanye West’s musical catalogue. Never again can any of his projects be disentangled from his sins, a fact that becomes bleakly obvious when you consider the fact that Late Registration’s 20th anniversary came and went with naught but a whimper. At the same time, Kanye West is a cautionary tale of what will happen when you lose sight of your fundamental principles and fall headfirst into the glamour of celebrity, wishing to have your cake and eat it too. It hardly matters which way you slice it, though; it utterly sucks through every lens.
