According to Reuters,Kanye West’s latest album, Graduation, will feature a select few guest spots.

“When I hear the records of my favorite bands — the Killers or Coldplay — you only hear one voice from start to finish,”
says West.

Indeed this is a short list, as the only contributors to Graduation will be Coldplay’sChris Martin, T-Pain, Mos Def and DJ Toomp.

“You can’t control if people are going to buy your music. At the end of
the day you have to keep challenging yourself,”
says Jay-Z, who is a strange omission from the guest list on the album. “He has
zero problem with that. He is never complacent. We mixed
‘Stronger,’
I’m not even joking with you, 17 times. He could not get the bass drum
exactly the way he wanted it.”

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“The beauty of Kanye is his unpredictability,” adds L.A. Reid, chairman of Island Def Jam. “You don’t
get to the cover of Time magazine by being fluffy. Real stars are on
their path and they don’t apologize. Jimi Hendrix threw his guitar down
and set it on fire. He didn’t think about ‘Should I?’ He just set his
guitar on fire. The ones thinking about it too hard aren’t real stars.
That’s manufactured.”

The producer/MC was influenced by albums such as Radiohead’s Thom Yorke’s solo effort The Eraser while working on Graduation, which completes the trifecta of school-theme albums beginning with 2003’s The College Dropout.West followed Dropout with Late Registration in 2005, which spawned such hits as “Gold Digger” and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone.”

“I want everything associated with me to be the best and push the
boundary of what you think is possible,”
says West . “Whether it’s my
music, my videos or my tour, I’m trying to be the best.”

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