Hip-hop's man of two minds

Kanye West

"Graduation" (Roc-a-Fella)

*** 1/2 Kanye West is hip-hop's square peg. The rapper and producer, whose third album, "Graduation," officially emerges Tuesday from its cloud of hype and controversy, is prodigiously talented and stunningly self-confident; he's earned the love of pop's fussiest insiders and its most casual fans. Yet even in his lofty position, West doesn't really belong.

West is most successful when he feels fearless, getting in the face of his rivals with startling beats and audacious rhymes. But like many artists who move a genre forward, West does care about the rules he breaks, and he loses it a little when he lets those conventions back him into a corner. That's when the misfit reemerges, blustering and ridiculous.

"Graduation" shows West in both modes. That's not surprising, since this album is as much a self-assessment as it is an assertion of superiority. Like a devoted comrade engaged in some cleansing self-criticism, West fully exposes the self hip-hop demands that he be: the pugnacious, narcissistic, bling-grubbing power player with a "head so big, you can't sit behind me." But even as his lyrics on battle cries such as "Stronger," "Champion" and "The Glory" verge on embarrassing self-worship, the music -- and the way the words interact with the music -- reveals another story, of West's conflicted desire to go beyond the hip-hop lineage that generated those very clichés.

To say that hip-hop, not West, is the problem that occasionally drags down "Graduation" may seem audacious on a level that matches West's own bombast. West himself has always bowed to the genre he's taken by storm, his soul-kissed productions reflecting the influence of producers Prince Paul and DJ Premier (who provides artful scratches on this album's standout ballad, "Everything I Am") and his lyrics referencing elders such as his mentor Jay-Z (the closer on "Graduation," "Big Brother," is a loving if Oedipal paean to Mr. Carter). As rap's current crossover king -- the one rapper many listeners who "don't get rap" can embrace -- he must negotiate the tension between his restless artistic drive and his loyalty to the brotherhood whose approval he covets.

Like the art-school kids who invented classic rock by arrogantly refashioning the roots music they loved, West is a flexible child of the bourgeoisie. For all his fetishization of bling, his class mobility manifests itself most clearly in the freedom of his artistic choices. Splitting the difference between intellectual "backpacker" rap and streetwise gangster romanticism, West moves sideways, up and down again in his songs, sometimes playing the satirist, sometimes dead sober.