The College Dropout, West's first album, was, in light of its more ambitious successors, the more straightforward hip-hop record — the guest-sung pop choruses were kept to a minimum, while the emphasis was on guest stars and long verses. It was long, shapeless in its second half, and occasionally showed up West's clumsy mic skills. Not that you could complain — the guests were almost uniformly strong (highpoint: Common and Talib Kweli on Get 'Em High), and West's production was scintillating. The standard 'chipmunk soul' style developed producing other rappers records (Jay-Z's The Blueprint most famously) was still there, with the electric charge of Two Words and the low-funk of Spaceship added to the mix.

His second record, Late Registration, was a gorgeous, soulful, garrulous beast, an obvious stab at instant classicism with its Jon Brion strings and pop hooks, but a record, like vintage Beatles or XTC, that aims for hearts and hands and achieves everything it wants on the principles of ego-driven ambition. What let the record down were one or two dull moments (Never Let Me Down, the Be-lite My Way Home), but its highpoints, to this listener, are some of the finest hip-hop (and how small and reductive that word seems for these songs) of the decade — the mirrorball strut of We Major, the elegiac, tense Gone. These were the songs West enlisted Brion for, and it paid off — the strings and keys were alternately lush and stabbing, but never obvious. Gone in particularly is a home for some of the least mushy and most driving strings heard on a contemporary release.

So, here comes album three, and stakes is high, to quote De La Soul.

West's egocentricity is so great and multi-faceted at this point that it's basically strong enough to float a concept album, and it isn't too hard to see Graduation as that very record — a winner's strut, the podium stance. The title fits in with the collegiate dropout running-joke/idea, but it's also triumphal: here I am, a champion.

This doesn't wash away the bad taste in the mouth generated by the constant self-talk that clogs nearly every track on the record. Ambition is meritorious, and West's has led him to achieve some grand things, but at some point it needs to be tied to something higher than personal realisation — art is the work of the self  satisfactorily exteriorised to become a second object, a new thing. With West, it's always the same thing — every track, more or less, speaks of his glory, the glory (a track title, incidentally). It's warming to hear West in interviews talk about his plans for domination, his corny/lofty desires, his desire to pop up hip-hop, or vice versa, but the well has run dry lyrically. The very thing which distinguished him from the pack on The College Dropout is now a crutch that seems to be meaning less and less with each new album; that is, lyrically, the desire for the high life, and the subsequent mixture of happiness, dissatisfaction and shame it can bring you. In 2003, this was borderline revolutionary in commercial hip-hop terms (remember all three records have been released on Jay-Z's RocaFella label, which boasts, besides Jigga, a whole stable of thoughtless money-rappers), but now it seems like the expected, a position he has neither developed or presented more wittily than on Dropout's We Don't Care. A lifelong wrestle with religious doubt might be excused, but at this point, last year's moral quandary begins to feel like a question that needed an answer a long time ago. Add to this West's seeming pride in being conflicted and 'the one to raise tough questions' and you have a fatal need to half-hearted moralism.