Much of that comes from his gift for listening, for orchestrating: Over the course of his career, he has absorbed sounds and styles from the underground-whether Chicago drill, UK bass music, or Bon Iver’s postmodern folk-and reimagined them, changing the course of the mainstream along the way. From the baroque grandeur of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to the punk fragments of Yeezus, from the social commentary of The College Dropout to the confessional summits of 808s & Heartbreak, West has always been at the leading edge, tirelessly expanding his scope and sound-and shifting everyone else’s playing field in the process. He launched his MC career with 2004’s The College Dropout and hasn’t looked back, releasing a string of groundbreaking-and often self-contradicting-albums, each of them a pacesetter for the culture around it. His chopped-and-pitched, sample-heavy “chipmunk soul” sound would define rap for years after. After contributing production to a series of increasingly high-profile projects (including work with Foxy Brown and the Mase-fronted Harlem World), West broke through in 2001 with his work on JAY-Z’s The Blueprint, producing and cowriting some of the album’s biggest songs (“Izzo ,” “Takeover”).

Raised in Chicago by his mother, an English professor, West initially studied to be a painter while making beats on the side-a multidisciplinary drive that came to mark his career.

Few artists have had as deep an impact on pop culture as Kanye West.

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