DOWN WITH PANTS!

Roc-A-Fella records to Down With Pants! usually represents a lot of what's wrong with rap these days. Groups like Young Gunz and State Property are very young, inexperienced kids who sing out their bling and bitches. These are topics that don't fly with my tastes. I could care less about these groups and because of it have avoided other Roc-A-Fella acts including Jay-Z.

That being said, Kanye West's new disc, College Dropout, is one of the freshest, most introspective and smart and yet fun CD's to drop in quite a while proving my biases against all Roc-A-Fella artists as false, for the time being. Radio friendly songs like Slow Jamz and All Falls Down combine seamlessly with more hard hitting tunes like Through The Wire and Two Words (featuring my favorite rapper Mos Def). His lyrics are complex and intelligent and are also very contradictory but knowingly so. Here is someone that understands what it means to make money and like money but also understands it's many trappings.

On the negative side are some of the skits. If you aren't De La Soul, who pioneered the hip-hop skit, then maybe you should bag them all together. They never seem to come together cohesively and fail to make much sense. On the plus side they are pretty short and don't detract from the songs too much.

Overall, Down With Pants! was very surprised and satisfied with this disc. Kanye West has proven himself to be a tough new act that we'll be looking forward to hearing more from. Now if Roc-A-Fella could just find some more artists like him.