West described " Stronger" as an "emancipation", as he uses the song to vent his frustration over mistakes he has made in the past. As his verse draws to a close, West chastises that a person can't dwell on the past, and charges himself with living his life like he has no tomorrow.

Since Graduation 's release, countless other record producers have followed suit in blurring the lines of conventional hip-hop with the incorporation of electronic production. The drone is drowned by the music that arrives at the chorus, which is a conflation of ambient synths and an astral backing choir crafted from a non-verbal vocal sample of " Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John. Two days later, on the morning of August 30, the clean version of the album leaked onto the Internet.

Recording and track leak [ edit ] West's experiences on arena rock tours such as U2's Vertigo Tour (pictured) inspired his direction for the album. Graduation is the third studio album by American rapper and producer Kanye West, released on September 11, 2007, through Def Jam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records. Additionally, West would often test his new songs on his iPod, in his office, in dance clubs and just about anywhere people might listen to his music. However, he felt West spent too much of the album rationalizing his obsession with his fame in sketchy fashion and occasionally awkward rhymes, "little stuff like his failure to convert 'this'-'crib'-'shit'-'live'-'serious' into a rhyme" on "Champion" or "'at bay at a distance' into an idiom" on "Big Brother".

He continued writing, "Gangsta rap, street music, and the like have yet to recover from that showdown, as only two albums of the sort have gone platinum in the 2010s— Kevin Gates' Islah and Meek Mill's Dreams Worth More Than Money—If anything, street music has also made a shift since Kanye began to peal back more layers of himself on Graduation; 50's whole get up was about being an indestructible, emotionless robot. When my album drops and 50's album drops, everybody wins because you're gonna get a lot of good music at the same time".The six awards that the album led to West contending for at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards were among his total of eight nominations for the ceremony, making West the most nominated music artist of that show.

At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional critics, the album received an average score of 79, based on 32 reviews. Stronger" is built around a sample of " Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by Daft Punk, while its echoing deep, hallow drums affect the electronic sound.

Artwork [ edit ] Dropout Bear being pursued by a monstrous cloud within the interior artwork of Graduation. West has stated that growing up, he would listen to hip-hop music at home or in his car, but when he felt like dancing, he would attend a house club. Swash wrote that it "highlighted the diverging facets of hip-hop in the last decade; the former was gangsta rap for the noughties, while West was the thinking man's alternative". The composition then enters an instrumental passage and finishes off with a sweeping string arrangement.