If you were to walk by a brown-haired, blue-eyed 11-year-old in full catholic school garb and a JanSport backpack, singing at the top of his lungs “drug dealing, just to get by!” would you double take? What if that same prepubescent suburbanite spat out “I say fuck the police that’s how I treat ‘em”? Would your mouth drop? Or would you simply acknowledge that the potentially disturbed child was exhibit A of the pop music climate of early 2004, as Kanye West brought backpacker rap to the masses — even those little squirts who wore backpacks to Mass and rapped along about materialism, class inequality, and yeah, some Slow Jamz too.

Having been fed a steady diet of Pink Floyd and U2 while riding along in my dad’s pickup truck, I was destined to fall in love with The College Dropout, Kanye West’s soulful and acerbic popular debut. If music challenged the status quo, even a status quo I was too young to understand, it was worth my ear. And challenging The College Dropout was — and it was catchy. It was angry. It was a celebration of everybody waiting on their Spaceships to fly far, far away.

If Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below launched now decade-long love affair with hip hop, The College Dropout poured gas on the fuse. The album subverted my weekly chore of singing along in church with the raucous anthem “Jesus Walks,” helped launch my puberty by casting Stacey Dash in the “All Falls Down” video, and introduced me to the likes of Talib Kweli, Mos Def, and Common. All of a sudden, that catholic school new kid’s uniformed shorts started to sag a little lower, his stride grew a little looser, and his vocabulary became a little….harsher.

Now remember, this was Kanye before Kim, Kanye before Katrina, Kanye before the Kanye most now know and loathe. Ten years later, he’s by all means deplorable, and I veered from the path he so magnetically laid — I’m graduating from college this month. But as the 11-year-old who felt trapped in the private school bubble, for those winter and spring months of 2004, The College Dropout gave me a reason to fly.