I found a mixtape of all the Kanye GOOD Friday tracks from 2009-2010. I've been listening to it a lot. I guess it's borderline "pirating," but all the tracks were released for free, and I just happened to locate it on DatPiff or something, listed right alongside the Freshman Adjustment and Graduate and Can't Buy Me Nothing mixtapes. So, I can assume the record company knows it's out there and doesn't care. Conscience clean.
I'm sort of shocked by the quality of some of these tracks. The standouts (aside from the tracks that would appear on later records) are "GOOD Friday," "Don't Stop," and "Christian Dior Denim Flow," and they're all album-quality. I'm not nuts about the Big Sean verses... it's almost like they were tacked on to the end of "Christian Dior..." and others just to act as a placeholder. It even sounds a bit like the production fades when Sean's verses kick in, as though he's doing it by himself after the fact. Not awesome. He's not great.
But still, "Don't Stop" is just an all-aces track with one of the best sample loops in Kanye production history. I sometimes wonder what might have been if Child Rebel Solider had actually released an album... but in this context it really feels more like a Kanye featuring Pharrell and Lupe track, which is fine with me. It's strong in every regard (use of the word "faggot" aside... that irks me a bit... who was that, Pharrell? Ugh. What a weird guy). I think it would have worked on MBDTF. It's the best of the bunch in terms of consistency and quality. And it probably ranks among my favorite Kanye tracks... at least in the top 20.
Anyway, it's cool to look at this testing-the-Waters period prior to MBDTF, when Kanye was just unleashing this tidal wave of free music to the world. And of course this is where "Devil in a new Dress" and the ungodly awesome "So Appalled" originated. Not to mention "Christmas in Harlem" which was later (wisely) trimmed down and officially released as a single and part of some sort of Xmas compilation... I forget which. It's a great Christmas song with an infectious, soulful vocal and a really warm and cheery atmosphere. The final version trimmed it back to just Kanye, Cyhi the Prince and Teyana Taylor, and it's a good 2 minutes shorter, but works better as a single and as a Christmas track.
It's funny that most of these amounted to throwaways, but the compiled Fridays tracks still sound better and more interesting than 90% of the world's hip-hop, then or now.