Maximalism is an aesthetic of excess and redundancy. The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more." Kanye West, in his recent years, has been given the title of a maximalist when it comes to his music. The beats and the production of his albums and other works have evolved drastically from the soulful beats of College Dropout and The Blueprint. The Young Musicians Foundation has even arranged and orchestrated a symphony based off merging the works of Beethoven with West’s Yeezus and The Life of Pablo. The juxtaposition is jarring. Two musicians in different times who both “… wrought havoc on existing musical forms, alienated many, and forever changed the course of musical history.”
Not many know that West dabbled with the “more is more” philosophy long before My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus. It’s evident from his sophomore release, Late Registration.
After seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an American film directed by Michel Gondry, West was captivated by the lushly orchestrated score of the movie and sought after its composer. Jon Brion, the film's composer, didn’t have a hip-hop background but he agreed to work with West anyway.
The recording sessions between West and Brion were exploratory, using a broad spectrum of sounds. West brought his soulful samples, drum beat programming, and unfinished rap verses to the sessions and would construct his songs from there. He worked alongside Brion to choose a variety of unique instruments and attempted to incorporate their distinctive sound into the song's texture; Brion played each of them for West.
The album is largely orchestral in nature with a harmonious combination of string arrangements, piano chords, brass flecks, and horn riffs among other symphonic instrumentation. A myriad of foreign and vintage instruments were also used, such as a celesta, harpsichord, Chamberlin, CS-80 analog synthesizer, Chinese bells and berimbau, vibraphones, and marimba.
The production carried West in an unforeseen new direction, a raised tempo and a driving, pulsating bassline colliding with tasteful live baroque instrumentation to present an extravagant vision of the Kanye sound. On songs like “Celebration,” Brion conducted a 20-piece orchestra. “Bring Me Down” holds more orchestration than any other than any other track on the album.
But Brion makes his mark on tracks like "Gone.” It contains some of the most elaborate orchestral arrangement of the entire album. The composition begins with a vocal sample of "It's Too Late" by Otis Redding and a two-chord piano ostinato, followed by a simplistic funk beat. As the song progresses, its structure gradually morphs and develops more and more musicality.
The composition assumes ten violins, four violas, and four cellos amid the verses. all of which initially come in brief staccato bursts that simply punctuate the rhythm but eventually expand and consolidate into a fully formed string section by the arrival of the harmonic choruses.
Late Registration is the foundation for latter-day maximalist Kanye works like Cruel Summer and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in its kitchen sink sonics but also its tone. The album dives fearlessly into the dark of the black American experience.
On Yeezus, West screams of the monopoly of wealth that the rich and powerful have and how they use it to ensure the powerlessness of others, making the poor and the weak like the new slaves. It wasn’t received as easily as when he spoke of communities beset by crime-gripping restless youth with a lack of opportunities on “Heard Em Say”. Or when he told the story of his family coming together to his grandma’s hospital bedside due to income-based lack of access to proper medical care in “Roses”.
“Crack Music” is Late Registration’s purest collision of Kanye’s black radical consciousness and Jon Brion’s orchestral flair. Kanye rhythmically walks through the collapse of the civil rights movement, the rise of the crack epidemic, and hip-hop’s role as a coping mechanism and gainful employment amid it all.
Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone deemed the record "an undeniable triumph, packed front to back, so expansive it makes the debut sound like a rough draft”; that’s exactly how it Late Registration stands against the rest of Kanye West’s works – if not the very best, it remains the prototype.
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