hat’s going to happen to Kanye West? The quadruple-platinum sales of Late Registration made him a genuine superstar instead of just a media darling, and he seems somehow both bigger and smaller in the aftermath. That album was a high-production-values extravaganza, piling swooping strings, Vegas crooners, rippling harps, and sweet barroom piano figures atop each other into a three-ring circus that left one agog but also betrayed. Kanye’s nervy insecurity, his sense that he could never do enough to win our affection, was gone. Cluttering up his rhyme schemes, complicating his cadences, and toughening his voice, he gave up the goofy eagerness that made The College Dropout so endearing, the sense that we were hearing a lifelong rap nerd indescribably excited to be finally allowed behind the mic. This stuff was more intricate, but it didn’t sound like much fun.

So has Kanye the persona worn out his welcome? Will he ever offer us anything besides cocky swagger, a persecution complex, and the ability to make a self-deprecating joke once in awhile? And will he please stop making godawful songs with Pharrell?

It was with an eye to answering at least some of these questions that I picked up the recent Mick Boogie mixtape, Second Semester, which gathers a lot of his guest spots, remix verses, and mixtape cuts from the last year and a half. It’s not perfect—it’s missing his crucial verse from Ghostface Killah’s “Back Like That” remix and his tough, angry “Grammy Family” verse; most of the “remixes” of Late Registration tunes are just live versions; some of these verses are twice recycled—but it still serves as a decent vantage point from which to view Kanye’s progress since the benchmark of his last album.

He still badly wants you to know just how good a rapper he is, writing involved couplets that almost trip over themselves in their eagerness to show their cleverness (“Let’s get back to Basics / When shit gets worse, we Converse / How we need a New Balance before the lines get crossed like Asics”). And he still offers plenty of patently ridiculous boasting, `a la “Ralph Lauren was boring before I wore him.” He has worn his signature material—the preening MC who shoves his preening in your face, the self-deprecating jokester, the conflicted and human socially conscious rapper—pretty well dry, to the point where his materialist MC/conscious MC dichotomy sounds just like pandering to different, irreconcilable demographics: “I say black on black is the hate that hate made / I’m talking Sara Lee with the dough, that cake made,” he rhymes on “Back to Basics.” This is remarkable, considering how vital and fully formed his persona seemed when he stepped out of the gate with Dropout. But then, it’s happened to better rappers—look what happened to Eminem, who seems to have forever locked himself in the lonely mansion of his mind and half-heartedly serves his millions of expectant fans some warmed-over slop every year or so to keep them quiet.

The freshest moments here, then, are the moments where Kanye breaks out of his patterns, finding a new story for his darting, voracious mind. On a few tracks, he shows an eye for telling details, an ability to paint a strikingly specific picture in a brief window, such as on Little Brother collaboration “Nawww”; “Now how the hell I wind up arguing with this bitch / Know everything but don’t know shit / Kinda reminiscent of Anna Nicole Smith / I just turned my music up, like ‘Damn, that some cold shit.’ ” He does it again on “We Can Make It Better,” breaking down the difference between Princeton black sororities: “Somebody told me Delta’s brown skinned, AKA’s light-skinned / And they s’posed to be bougie / So they got white friends.” He adds of a sorority sister, “She had a nigga hit her, now she only date white men / And if a nigga even wave at her it’s frightening.” It hits the same sad/sadly funny divide as “Couldn’t afford a car, so she named her daughter Alexis,” and proves what we already knew, which is that we like empathetic Kanye more than preening Kanye.

There’s a lot more on this mixtape: some new Common verses, who’s currently making the mixtape new-album promo tour. He sounds like himself, rapping in the warm yet vague generalities he prefers, like “Deep in the ocean is the motion of life.” I’m choosing my words carefully here, because apparently questioning the inherent quality of Common or Mos Def is tantamount to single-handedly setting back the civil rights movement, but Common sounds fairly condescending while berating an underachieving girlfriend on “Caught up in the Hype”: “I thought my ‘Real Nigga Quotes’ would make you truer / If you won’t let me school you / At least let me tutor.” There’s also Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick Push,” which after about a hundred spins still sounds great, and some promising album tracks from Rhymefest. And then there’s Consequence, who hasn’t flipped his admittedly bouncy and infectious flow on a single song I’ve yet heard.

Technically the worst rapper here, it says something about Kanye that he’s by far the most captivating presence on Second Semester. I’m rooting for him to stop spinning his wheels and to redefine his on-record persona—to stop being so mealy-mouthed about his convictions and so glib about his failings. Displaying a slight twinge of guilt about the origins of the big, fat diamond chain sitting on your shirt before dismissing it and strolling on is not being “socially conscious.” We get your point about the allure of capitalism, Kanye. I sincerely hope you have something else to tell us. Like I said, I’m rooting for him. But then again, I’m also still rooting for Eminem to come out of his coma.