Today is a very important day.
Forget anything else you know or think you may know.
Today, in history, everything changed in two very important years, 2007 and 2001, for hip-hop fans.
Kanye West released his third studio album Graduation September 11, 2007
Kanye West, on this day in 2007, dropped one of his greatest albums, Graduation. Before this album, Kanye had already given us College Dropout and Late Registration which did very well but Graduation changed the game.
People have even gone as far as to say that Kanye, with this album, changed the game for mainstream hip-hop. He moved away from the ‘gangsta rap’ and gave us an album that embraced sampling in a big stream of genres making the album one of the most diverse ones we had seen. The Graduation album sold nearly one million albums in that year and started a new phase of hip-hop that was a fusion of different genres which paved the way for some of your faves to come up!!
The album is arguably one of the most memorable from 2007 and even though some of us were just shy teens, we remember the Flashing Lights video, singing Stronger, enjoying Good Morning and screaming “Uh Uh you can’t tell me Nothing!!”
Jay-Z released his sixth album The Blueprint September 11, 2001
There’s a reason why Jay Z is one of the gods of hip-hop. On September 11, which happened to be a tragic day in the lives of Americans, Jay Z dropped this album (unintentionally) and still managed to sell about 427,000 copies in the first week alone.
The album was so good it stayed at number one on the charts for weeks and for some of us, that was when Kanye was officially introduced to the world through his productions on 4 songs on the album including the mega-hit song, Izzo (H.O.V.A).
The album was just recently added to a list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” recordings in America by the National Recording Registry.
50 Cent released his self-titled album, Curtis September 11, 2007
This album was dropped the same period as Kanye West’s Graduation and it turned into a competition of who could make better first-week sales. Y’all know how 50 Cent can be lol he overhyped the album and even said he will retire if Kanye’s album did better than his (He didn’t). He lost the competition ut he lost like a champ! He sold 691,000 in the first week and Kanye sold 957,000 copies.
The Curtis album was considered to be one of 50 Cent’s worst albums but that’s mostly because he changed his style a bit and leaned into pop music. The album had production credits from the likes of Dr Dre, Eminem, Havoc and Timbaland and featured from artistes like Akon, Justin Timberlake and Mary J. Blige. Y’all remember ‘Ayo Technology’? Yeah, that was one of the biggest hits on the album.
We don’t blame him tho, he wasn’t a bad rapper…people were just beginning to accept new artistes now and, he was slowly becoming an old rapper for us.
More albums dropped on this day especially in 2007. Fabulous, Ja Rule and even countless others gave us some alums but, these three artistes made history, changing the game and in 50 Cent’s case, losing like a champ to Kanye!!
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