Yeezy
While often known for having a colorful public persona, its hard to deny that Kanye West has one of the most impressive and influential musical resumes of this past decade. He's had the oppurtunity to produce some of the most forward thinking albums in the genre with a team of established and up and coming artists with a multitude of musical backgrounds. This infographic dissects Kanye's first seven album releases and looks closer at what he's doing musically, in terms of length, samples, popularity, producers, guest artists, and song rating.
The Structure
The Infographic takes on the shape of a snaking path of tracks. This was a desicion made to show separation album to album. Each album takes up a certain percentage of a full circle depending on the album length. A full circle would be two hours long. Songs are divided by this same structure. Upon every new album release the graph changes rotational direction to both separate each album's info from one another, as well as signal an artistic switch, something Kanye is well known for.
The Data
This infographic dissects each song into a large number of separate data points. There are two timelines headed in each direction. To the outside of the circle a viewer can look at the samples used in the production of the track and on the inside of the circle a viewer can look at the producers and guest artists on the track and their length in the music industry. Each sample in the track is also looked at in terms of how popular of a song it is. The circle around the sample grows according to the number of youtube views associated with each sample. Each track is also coupled with a rating by me out of 5 and a timeline that shows when Kanye is rapping and when the guest artist is.
