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Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2005: Kanye West
Kanye West is Billboard's Greatest Pop Star of 2005 for how he owned the year both on the charts and in the headlines.
West was musically and thematically referencing a cross-section of trendy, era-defining creative signifiers, like Michel Gondry and Ray — tying it all together in a winning pop formula that was undeniably infectious, but that also felt increasingly forward-pushing. He’d produced fellow Chicagoan Common’s acclaimed fifth album Be earlier in ‘05 and suddenly dropped one of the year’s boldest singles in the cascading “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” both the original and the more conflicted, Jay-Z-assisted remix. By decade’s end, bands would take a backseat at the vanguard of popular culture, but in ’05, Pete Wentz & Co. announced themselves as rock torchbearers with self-loathing anthems, clever music videos and ambitions well beyond what the Warped Tour had to offer.
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