Pitchfork

While rap music famously thrives on the kind of drama surrounding this week's 50 vs. Kanye record-sales standoff, even this showdown's closest followers would probably admit there's something faintly procedural about it. Maybe it's because album sales don't really work as a precise measure of absolute popularity anymore. Maybe it's because 50's a shadow of his former self and no longer considered among the best, biggest, or most anything. Or maybe it's because Universal labelmates 50 and West seem more like they're doing this for us than for themselves. This is a prize fight between two heavyweight boxers moving in polar-opposite directions; the former weakly flailing through a creative crisis and a serious absence of hunger, the latter trying to transcend America by setting his sights on nothing less than the entire world.

For all the pageantry, the most substantial takeaway from Kanye's new album is the realization that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself. Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, West's third album in four years is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet. It also caps off an incredible (maybe even unprecedented) run: In terms of consistency, prolificness, and general all-around ability, it's hard to find anyone in mainstream rap who can touch what he's achieved within the same timeframe.

Where College Dropout and Late Registration mostly functioned as contagious nostaglia trips, Graduation finds him settling into the pocket; instead of looking inside for answers, he's looking out to the world. When he raps "I shop so much I can speak Italian" on "Champion", it's obvious he's holding up worldliness as a point of pride. His production choices reinforce that belief: Here, Kanye splices his well-articulated production style with a brand new set of influences-- most of them European. What he ends up with is a record that splits the difference between two distinctive styles: his familiar strings and brass, helium vocal samples, and warm soul samples on one side; corroded rave stabs, vinegary synth patches, and weirdly modulated electronic noises on the other. (Ironically, the latter all have roots in West's hometown of Chicago.)

While Graduation is far from the electro-house record some fans predicted when the Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger" first leaked, Kanye's interest in French house and rave extend beyond that one track. The stunning "I Wonder" combines a gentlemanly, piano-led sample (courtesy of 70s folk/jazz artist Labi Siffre) with a frizzy synth lead and alien-sounding keys, only to drown it all out with a massive swoop of strings; the weirdly dystopian club track "Drunk and Hot Girls" lurches along at a snail's pace, mixing Can's "Sing Swan Song" with a blend of gypsy music and detuned electronics for maximum queasiness; and the string-led "Flashing Lights" marries a Bond-worthy coda to staccato sounds and cut-up vocal samples. Where lesser producers have tried to bridge this gap only to wind up with beats that sound like bad mashups, West and co-producer DJ Toomp (T.I., "What You Know") make the juxapositions feel utterly natural. Combined with some other familiar source material ("Champion", for example, nicks from Steely Dan), that undercurrent of experimentation puts Kanye's talents to good use.

And that's barely scratching the surface. Aside from the patchy "Barry Bonds" (on which an inspired West confounds the odds by drastically outsmarting an uncharacteristically lazy Lil Wayne on the mic), nearly everything here feels tight and inventive. The aforementioned "I Wonder" and "Flashing Lights" are immediate highlights, as is the old-school gospel rave-up of "The Glory" and future smash "Good Life", which features T-Pain pitting his autotuned hooks against a bed of summery, squealing synths. Previous singles "Can't Tell Me Nothing" and "Stronger" somehow take on new life in context of the record, and even the Chris Martin-aided "Homecoming" feels like it hits the right notes.

Lyrically, West is magnanimous, corny, self-aggrandizing, and likeable in the all the usual ways. The difference here is that he's dialed down his inner conflict. The neurotic inner monologues of his most engaging verses are virtually absent here. If there's one criticism to be made of Graduation, it's that in striving for universality, he's sacrificed a more personal dimension of himself. The only time we even really get close to the mental hand-wringing of his early albums is on the closing "Big Brother", where he details his lifelong admiration for Jay-Z and hints at the post-Dropout turbulence between the two, before riffing on his own chorus to conclude: "My big brother was Big's brother/ So here's a few words from ya kid brother/ If you admire somebody you should go head and tell 'em/ People never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em".

Of course, West's true genius has always come out in his production work, and hearing him find natural ways of fitting these disparate elements together is worth the increased number of Louis Vee brags. While it might not be as substantial a record as we're used to hearing from him, it is his greatest leap forward, and further proof that few are as skilled at tracing out the complicated contours of pride, success and ambition as he is.