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Upon my first reading I thought you were hitting big points without a lot of detail. A passionate, emotional direct, sometimes clumsy, sometimes graceful, seemingly surface-level defense of an album that could be ascribed the same qualities. Let me be the first to salute the (possibly unintentional) formal brilliance of this essay. Here's to the self-proclaimed Elvis of our day. 808s deserves applause for its intentions and a nod for its achievements. One hopes that once he overcomes this bout of self-pity and grief, this ambition will manifest itself in an even greater way. I didn't hear anything else in 2008 that featured an artist challenging himself and pushing himself to the edge of his limitations as much as 808s & Heartbreak did for Kanye. Its an album of awkwardness, ambition and honesty that is extremely refreshing coming from an artist who could just as easily keep shilling out more of the same with great returns. And the album ends up sounding like a robot discovering its humanity.īy "Coldest Winter" Kanye proves himself to be just as big as he boasts he is (or at least on his way), with a heart bigger than any of the written-by-committee trash found on most Top 20 radio. West uses these tried and despised tools to create something wholly new and interesting. The true beauty of 808s comes from the fact that Mr.
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Brion's love of orchestral strings appears to have also influenced Kanye (see "Robocop" on Storytellers below). It was introduced to Kanye by composer / producer / songwriter Jon Brion ( Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fiona Apple's When The Pawn., Meaningless) who co-produced most of Kanye's sophomore effort Late Registration. The 808 drum machine is known as a punchline in the music industry for sounding unapologetically fake. Its not always the most aesthetically pleasing but its real in a way that is absent from most pop. But in this day and age why should that stop him? His use of auto-tune I find most effective in his live performances, where the rawness of his voice often overpowers the electronic vibrato of the correction tool. Then there's the formal elements, most specifically the auto-tune. Kanye's not thinking straight and neither are his songs as they bounce through his doubts ("Love Lockdown"), the career he chose ("Amazing"), his regrets ("Street Lights"), and - most underrepresented on this album - his cool (the transcendent " Paranoid"). Sometimes on the same song - "Heartless" laments the loss of a girl, while also bragging "you'll never find nobody better than me." But, in a way, its an honest snapshot of the conflicted, unfiltered emotions one experiences after a break-up. On one hand it makes the album incredibly contradictory. Each song has all the immediacy we've come to know from Kanye (the man's first single was sung while his jaw was wired shut after a car accident) with little reflection. West is coping with this loss using his music, hoping for some sort of catharsis. Trying to excise the pain of losing a fiancé (she left him) and a mother (to a botched surgery) in the same year.Ībove all, Mr.
#WHEN DID 808S AND HEARTBREAK COME OUT FULL#
A loudmouthed, arrogant popstar lamenting the life he's built for himself full of money, women and sports cars? 808s & Heartbreak would be worthy of contempt were it not so beautifully contradictory and simply strange. A question arises - the same one that came to mind when I heard Charlie Kaufman would be directing a feature film of his own - why? The light among this desolate arrangement? The melodies of auto-tuned Kanye West. Sampled vocals create a mournful choir and the occasional chord on piano drops. With Kanye's most recent re-imagining of the VH1 Storytellers format, here's a review of what I believe to be his masterpiece, 808s & Heartbreak.īeeps and blips bounce back and forth over a sparse drum beat created by the generally reviled Roland TR-808 drum machine.