Guides/A Riffiter guide
Albums Kanye West produced
The chipmunk-soul prodigy who became hip-hop's most influential (and most volatile) auteur.
Kanye West (now legally Ye) is an American rapper and producer from Chicago who reshaped hip-hop production more than once, first with sped-up soul samples, then with maximalism, then with stark minimalism. This guide collects the albums he produced, from Jay-Z's The Blueprint to his own My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Before he was a rapper, Kanye West was the most wanted beatmaker in hip-hop, the producer who sped up old soul records into something joyous and new. Then he started rapping, and spent twenty years restlessly tearing up his own sound: orchestral on one album, Auto-Tuned on the next, industrial after that.
Few producers have been imitated by more people, across more eras. These are the albums where you can trace it, the ones he built for others, and the ones he built for himself.
- 1
The Blueprint
★ 4.3 · 9The album that made Kanye as a producer. His soul-sampling beats ("Izzo (H.O.V.A.)," "Heart of the City") gave Jay-Z his warmest record and announced a new sound for hip-hop.
- 2
The College Dropout
★ 4.2 · 429His debut as a rapper, and the fullest statement of the chipmunk-soul sound he'd been selling to everyone else, warm, funny and self-produced front to back.
- 3
- 4
Get Lifted
★ 4.5 · 3Kanye executive-produced the debut of his first GOOD Music signing, launching John Legend with a classic soul sensibility.
- 5
Late Registration
★ 4.1 · 389With co-producer Jon Brion, Kanye blew his sound wide open, strings, orchestration, ambition. The leap from prodigy to auteur.
- 6
Graduation
★ 4.2 · 601Stadium-sized and synth-bright, Graduation traded soul samples for arena melodies, and famously outsold 50 Cent head-to-head, tilting rap toward a new era.
- 7
808s & Heartbreak
★ 4.2 · 244Auto-Tuned, drum-machine cold and deeply sad, 808s invented a template that a whole generation of melodic rap (Drake, Kid Cudi, The Weeknd) would build on.
- 8
Man on the Moon: The End of Day
★ 4.1 · 21Kanye executive-produced Cudi's debut, the moody, melodic record that helped define the introspective rap of the 2010s.
- 9
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
★ 4.2 · 956His maximalist masterpiece, a wall of guests, samples and orchestral grandeur, routinely ranked among the greatest albums of its century.
- 10
Watch the Throne by Jay-Z & Kanye West
★ 3.9 · 21Two of rap's biggest egos and a luxurious, competitive co-production, "Niggas in Paris" chief among the spoils.
- 11
Yeezus
★ 4.2 · 876Stripped to industrial noise and minimalism (with Rick Rubin called in to cut it to the bone) Yeezus was Kanye's most abrasive, confrontational turn.
- 12
- 13
Kids See Ghosts by Kanye West & Kid Cudi
Kanye's collaborative album with Kid Cudi, cut from the same Wyoming run, a brief, psychedelic high point of his late catalogue.
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