'Ye

Here are a couple of things I noticed about Kanye West's new album, Graduation, by looking at its listing on allmusic.com:

- Track 1 ("Good Morning") is credited to "John, Taupin, West"
- Track 2 ("Champion") is credited to "Fagen, Becker, West"
- Track 8 ("Drunk and Hot Girls") is credited to "Karoli, Liebzeit, Schuering, Schmidt, Suzuki, West"

So apparently Kanye is sampling Elton John, Steely Dan, and Can, respectively. It's not like Kanye hasn't used some milquetoast, vaguely funky white dudes in his music before (hello, Maroon 5 dude!), but it sounds like it may still be some unexplored territory for him. The Can usage in particular will be interesting for me to overanalyze. Maybe this is old news to everybody and I'm just finding out now because I haven't really taken part in the prerelease buzz (or heard any songs off the new album, for that matter), but that should be interesting.

Something else encouraging from the tracklisting: there are no songs that clock in at less than 2:47. Does this mean that it's going to be an album without a thousand irritating "skits" in between every song? Or, more likely, did they just shove them all onto the ends of tracks you actually want to hear so they're harder to program out of the album on iTunes?

Kanye West, as you may recall, is one of the few rappers I bother to even try to keep up with (I usually try to give anything Talib Kweli does a listen, and that's about it, really), and I'll admit it's because in Kanye's case, I'm far more interested in the pop (the hooks, the grooves, etc) than the raps. Don't be fooled by my playing up the lyrics in the item from two years ago, it's all about the tunes. I look forward to hearing it regardless. I couldn't give a crap about 50 Cent's new album. I do I hope that he has a son that one day raps under the name Li'l Nickel, though.

Anyway, I think the dark horse in the Kanye vs. Fiddy sale-a-thon of September 11, 2007 is... *drumroll* Animal Collective! Ok, maybe that's just me...