"Heartless" and "Love Lockdown", both very good songs, work surprisingly well on the car radio, but they're second-tier Kanye West singles. By contrast, the more pop aspects of the album are where it relatively stumbles. It's no surprise that 808s is a bit of a grower: The record's best songs- "Paranoid", "Street Lights", "Coldest Winter", and "RoboCop"- are often its most dismal, with cavernous production giving the Auto-Tune vocals more of an echoing desolation than a pop sheen. From West's vocal delivery to the stuttering rhythms, the album reveals folds and layers on repeated listens where at first it seems almost horrifically one-note. The strings on "RoboCop", the relatively busy sounds of "Street Lights", the clapping drums on "Love Lockdown", and the 909 and descending synth on "Coldest Winter" are among the sonic highlights, though even these are subtle. (A similar trick is repeated, to much worse effect, later on "Bad News".)īut the album is much larger and brasher than it would first appear- the closer it hews to a mix of sad-sack indie pop and elegant, monied Patrick Bateman commercial 80s sounds, the better it works. Opener "Say You Will" boasts one of the record's biggest vocal lines but eventually runs out into a three-minute, table-setting outro- a patient, defeated-sounding collection of choral vocals and drum machines. The album does, however, sound purposefully removed from the start. Sure Eminem weaved biography into his songs but he also wore multiple faces and worked in and out of character when it suited him West, on the other hand, is one of the few hip-hop artists without any pseudonyms, let alone characters.Ĭolleagues at Pitchfork have therefore wondered why this wasn't a private record West made for himself, but again nothing he's done is private, and that's in part why he's been so compelling. This isn't new: Kanye West's music is about being a specific celebrity more than anyone's since the solo works of John Lennon. But filtering these ideas through John Legend or Chris Martin or whomever would essentially kill the whole effect. These are expressions of the specific feelings of one guy there is still, to West at least, more emotional nourishment to be wrung from song than speech, which certainly colored his decision here. But it functions here as a democratizer as much as a crutch, because like all Kanye West songs, these are primarily about the experience of Being Kanye West. West's singing is shaky, of course, which is in part why he leans on the Auto-Tune. Instead we get bedroom pop, quiet ruminations in which after staying up night after night pursuing and living the good life, Kanye wakes up to a cold, lonely dawn. If this guy was jumping on a radio fad here, we'd likely get an LP's worth of "Put On"s, his summer hit and collaboration with Young Jeezy.
But Kanye has always been more of a master assimilator: He's achieved in part because he's used wealth and fame to explore the wider world- culturally and artistically- rather than shut himself off from it. Stylized Auto-Tune seems to be on about every third song on top 40 radio these days, making West seem like an opportunist or a bandwagon-jumper.
In part it's because it's not what people want or expect from Kanye West. So why is this approach, from this guy, now such a problem? And, lest we forget, Kanye West himself made his name as a producer in part thanks to his "chipmunk soul" vocal samples. In this decade, records like Radiohead's Kid A/ Amnesiac, the Knife's Silent Shout, and Daft Punk's Discovery were heralded in part for screwing with vocals last year both Battles and Dan Deacon revived the old Alvin and the Chipmunks trick of shifting pitches and speeds and Bon Iver's forthcoming EP features a song sung through vocoder. But vocal manipulation isn't only the practice of radio-ready rap, of course- it's been a signpost for "futuristic music" ever since Joe Meek heard "a New World" almost 50 years ago.
Kanye 808s and heartbreak album pro#
The recent embrace of the common studio aid seems akin to pro wrestling saying, "Fuck it, this isn't real" and making it more transparent and scripted (and successful).
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