I was pretty disappointed with Graduation. Kanye holds so much promise, and Stronger had me all excited - it's one of my favourite individual songs of this year - but then the rest of the album is a pretty big dive squarely into the MTV market that I think a lot of people hoped he would be able to drag people away from. 50 Cent, that style of hip-hop and every image it represents, I've never had any time for. Drags the whole genre down, specifically the reason why so many people just bag all 'rap', as he and others like him soak up all the exposure. It's why you sort of hope for something more from Kanye. He's not that, but he appeals to it. He's shown bursts of this other thing, and he's clearly smart and very aware of what he's doing and exceedingly ambitious in regards to creating something special and spreading it global, so it's a shame when in the end it's an album full of fairly average mid-tempo laddish sort of tracks you can only really imagine booming from come teenagers car in a shopping mall car park. Stronger operates somewhere outside the space-time continuum as just a great song that will last for a long time - no small thanks to Daft Punk of course, and I thought just that he was using that sort of thing was a great sign of what was to come. Not so. Still think he's hip-hops best shot for a worthy global figurehead though, someone who straddles a bit of this and that.
And if Justin Timberlake doesn't make you dance after a few drinks, you have no soul.