Kanye West’s Pop Report Card: We Grade His Six Albums

Carl Williott | June 13, 2013 3:37 pm

With the June 18 release of Yeezus (or today, if we’re going by leaks), Kanye West has six solo albums and one joint album to his name in a nine-year span. And not a single one was a dud! It’s an incredible feat, so for our latest Pop Report Card, we decided to revisit West’s albums, to better understand how we got to the electro-freakout that is Yeezus, and grade them to see if all this hype over the past nine years was earned (spoiler alert: it was).

Digging back into his discography, it was exciting to relive the creative leaps taken between each album, and to chart his evolution from underdog backpack-rapping producer to The Nucleus. The biggest takeaway, though, is the staggering number of stone-cold classics in his oeuvre — they just keep piling up thanks to the great songs you forget about like “Gone” or “Hell Of A Life” or “Street Lights.”

So we invite you to take a trip down memory lane and get schooled in Kanye’s catalog up top — you’re just in time for registration.

Would you post this report card on your fridge, or do you take issue with some of the grades we handed out? Let us know below, or by hitting us up on Facebook and Twitter.