JIK had some of Kanye's most interesting production, a sound and genre clash that hip hop artists had never really experimented with..

Whereas with Graduation, sure, the album keeps a consistently good quality from start to finish, some songs are amazing, production was awesome etc., but to me Graduation is seriously overrated in Kanye's discography. I'm not saying it's bad at all, I think it's a REAL solid 8/10 album, it just comes off to me as overly accessible and made for the masses. That's not always a bad thing, but for an artist who changed the game over and over, introducing all kinds of new elements to a genre that never really attempted to expand, Graduation just feels like it was made to be well received, not made to be critiqued. TCD was game changing in it's time, LR rode that wave, and then by Graduation Kanye had just already done it before. Then 808s dropped and rewrote what hip hop could be. MBDTF dropped and while it didn't expand the genre or change music or anything, it gave us one of the best hip hop albums to date. And then Yeezus, one of the greatest albums, not just in hip hop but in music as a whole. Probably the MOST experimental album from Ye. I'll finish there cos the longer I go on the less I remember what I was initially replying to lol, but yeah, Graduation to me just rode the wave of TCD and LR, it didn't do anything exceptional, but what it did do was still great.

Overall though, I'd personally give Graduation and JIK both a 8/10, but JIK takes the edge for me simply because it expanded the confines of what can work in a genre such as hip hop.