West can’t sing, and it is that weakness for which this album will ultimately be remembered, some solid songs notwithstanding. Now he’s an underdog once more, a rapper who wants to sing.īut at the moment, Mr. West fought the notion that he was a producer trying to rap. Now they are the official record, uncertain melodies, banal lyrics and all.įor years Mr. In an earlier era these would have been demo tapes, left in a vault to await exhumation for an anniversary edition. On “Paranoid” you can actually hear laughing in the background, though whether it’s at or with Mr. Two songs, “Say You Will” and “Bad News,” stretch out with instrumental breakdowns long past their obvious conclusion point, as if Mr. But they feel nominal up against much of this album, which has the immediacy, looseness and rambling quality of a venting session recorded into a Webcam and posted on YouTube. West, who has always intensely policed his own image, these are shocking ruptures. “I know of some things that you ain’t told me,” he says on “Heartless.” “I did some things, but that’s the old me.”įor Mr. “Let me ask you how long have you known dude,” he raps on “Bad News.” “You played it off and act like he’s brand new/When did you decide to break the rules?” And the mistrust goes both ways.

Every song on the album is rife with anguish, and his lyrics, about the shards of broken relationships, though often tediously written, can carry a fresh sting. West uses electro (the title’s “808” refers to the Roland TR-808 drum machine) for its sparseness, so that he might emote unchallenged.įlaunting pain requires a sort of arrogance, too, so it’s little surprise that Mr. Their synth-driven electro had blasts of funk momentum. And in places, especially on the breezy, slick “Paranoid,” this music is redolent of the chilly, slightly irregular R&B the producers the Neptunes were making four or five years ago, for Kelis, Omarion and others. West try to sing these songs is far weirder. West has cited the electro-pop pioneer Gary Numan and T J Swan, who sang exuberant, nasal hooks on many a 1980s Queens rap track, as vocal reference points for this album, though in truth hearing Mr. By any measure, these are seismic changes, yet he persisted with recording. West split from his fiancée, Alexis Phifer. His mother, Donda West, died last November following complications from plastic surgery. West would have been forgiven for taking a break after releasing “Graduation,” his third album, last year.

After all, what is Kanye West without scale? At worst, it’s clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose. At best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. “808s & Heartbreak” sounds like none of his other albums, nor any rap album of note “minimal but functional” is how he has described it to MTV. And so, as he’s dismantling his storytelling structures, he’s also making his productions skeletal, and largely trading bombastic rapping for vulnerable singing. West’s earlier albums, he would have quickly undermined this sentiment of course a shopping spree would cheer him up but here, bluntness is the goal. On “Pinocchio Story” he continues his lament:

The product of a tumultuous year in his personal life, it operates solely on the level of catharsis no commentary, no self-consciousness, no concern for anything but feeling.

Kanye west 808s and heartbreak era