The College Dropout

Nearly all of it was produced by West; Last Call was co-produced with Evidence and Breathe In Breathe Out with Brian Miller. Recording began in 1999, and at one stage he worked in a two-bedroom apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a home studio in one room. He arrived at the studio with a backpack of old disks and demos, and produced some tracks in under fifteen minutes. He finished the rest in Los Angeles while recovering from the crash. In a January 2020 GQ interview he said that 30 to 40 percent was recorded on a Roland VS-1680.

The album leaked months before release, and he used the delay to add strings, gospel choirs and better drum programming, dropping tracks such as Keep the Receipt and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. His cousin Tony Williams was recruited two weeks before the deadline and sang on about five songs. West named The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as the album he had listened to most. School Spirit was released in a censored form because Aretha Franklin would not clear the sample otherwise. Samples include Chaka Khan's Through the Fire, the ARC Choir's Walk With Me and Marvin Gaye's Distant Lover.

Reception

It debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200 with 441,000 copies, behind Norah Jones, and had sold 3,358,000 US copies by June 2014. It reached 12 in the UK. Metacritic gives it 87. Kelefa Sanneh of the New York Times called it the first great hip-hop album of 2004, and Rob Mitchum of Pitchfork called it flawed and overlong but altogether terrific. It won the Pazz and Jop poll for 2004 and the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and Time named it among the 100 best albums of all time in 2006.