Kanye West


One of the most successful hip-hop artists and personalities of the past decade, Chi-town producer/emcee Kanye West may be hip-hop's most unlikely superstar. After Jay-Z's The Blueprint dropped in 2001 with West productions "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" and "Never Change," his patented chipmunk soul (sped-up soul loops for choruses; dramatic, sweeping strings) was ubiquitous and ushered in a new era of polished hip-hop formalism that was a nice rejoinder to the bombast of Timbaland and the Neptunes. Many doubted that West could make the transition from producer to emcee -- his flow was a bit rigid compared to his Roc-A-Fella counterparts, and his middle-class perspective was the antithesis of their crack raps -- but on his 2004 debut, College Dropout, West delivered one of the most satisfying and thematically complex pop albums of the decade, alternately accepting and rejecting rap's conspicuous consumerism and reconciling his middle-class, Judeo-Christian upbringing with hip-hop's more nihilistic archetypes. Subsequent albums (2005's Late Registration and 2007's Graduation) have documented West's accession from quirky underdog to king of the hip-hop world.