The full special airs tomorrow at 10am (EST) (the network airing on REVOLT TV is at 10pm):

On Monday, February 10, the music world will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the release of Kanye West’s barrier-defying and genre-defining debut album, The College Dropout.

While some will mark the occasion with think pieces and retrospectives, here at REVOLT, we’ll commemorate the date with a thorough and vivid profile of the album, as told by its contributors and those voices who helped shape Kanye’s persona in the public eye.

Now, despite all of the new and challenging music that emerges every week (and every day, as chronicled by Amrit Singh’s daily music report right here on REVOLT), sometimes in order to look forward to where music is headed, you have to look back at the albums that shaped its current sound, feel, and aesthetic. And really, perhaps no album from the past decade dictated modern music, or more specifically hip-hop music’s future, more than Kanye West’s The College Dropout.

Released on the heels of his mentor Jay Z’s The Blueprint and 50 Cent’s Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, Dropout was a thoroughly weird and idealistic album from an equally weird and idealistic visionary who has continued to turn music on its head throughout his illustrious, decade-long career.

From Graduation’s stadium-status anthems to 808s’ robot-heartbreak love songs to Yeezus’ futuristic punk-rap, Kanye’s proved time and again that he’s always a few (or a dozen) steps ahead, but it all started with Dropout.

In our look back at the album, we spoke with an esteemed list of Kanye’s collaborators, the execs who helped him perfect his vision, and the journalists who chronicled his rise, including Dame Dash, J. Ivy, Miri Ben Ari, Freeway, Common, John Monopoly, Emmanuelle Cuny-Diop, Kenny Burns, Coodie & Chike, GLC, Syleena Johnson, Ferris Bueller, Al Branch, Jon Caramanica, Rob Stone, and Matthew Schnipper. – REVOLT

We also threw up some unreleased footage during that era as well.