Kanye West Makes Music White People Can Sing With Their Car Windows Down

There’s plenty of reason to call Kanye West an asshole; the guy’s as peacockish and egomaniacal as they come, and he makes no apologies about it. The multi-platinum rapper / producer went way beyond comparing himself to the greats in a recent interview, planting the flag on what he considers his place in music history: “I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go,” he said. “I’m going down as a legend, whether you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain. They feel like, ‘Yo, he’s got a God complex, because he said if they wrote the Bible again that he would be in it’. Duh, yeah, I would be in it. I feel like I’m one of the more important people in pop culture right now. The Bible had 20, 30, 40, 50 characters in it. You don’t think that I would be one of the characters of today’s modern Bible? And people have their own forms of bibles now. It’s a new day and age…”

Needless to say, the biblical babble is a load of self-fellating bullshit. But regardless of how you feel about his attitude and bloated sense of self-worth, he’s damn good at what he does, and he’s milked ten Grammys out of three albums to prove it. Like it or not, Kanye’s bound to be remembered as one of the biggest artists to emerge on this side of the millennium. His latest release, 808s & Heartbreak, is just one more reason why.

With 808s, West finally steps outside his own comfort zone to make an album that flips a proverbial bitch on the life’s-a-party theme laced throughout his previous offerings. Makes sense, since he had to come to terms with the fact that the beautification hysteria he spent three albums celebrating might come off a little heartless, given that his mother died last year of cosmetic surgery complications (hence the deflated heart balloon cover art).

In addition to an orchestral assault of strings, piano, synths and animal sounds on the album, Kanye’s traded out his ego-tripping hip-hop flow entirely and replaced it with, well, robot singing. And when I say entirely, I mean entirely. He doesn’t rap on the album. At all. 808s & Heartbreak is an auto-tune overdose that takes some getting used to, especially if you’re still burying your inner suburban white kid and your only reference for auto-tune comes from accidental stops at the R&B station on your FM dial.

On first listen, I couldn’t hang. I skipped through the tracks, looking for Touch The Sky Part 2 or a blazing split spit session with Nas, but there were none to be found. I kept my hopes up till the very end, and as a fan of Kanye’s buttery flow I couldn’t have been more disappointed to realize that the only actual rapping on the album comes from Young Jeezy on the otherwise decent and cinematic track Amazing. Furthermore, to add a layer of bullshit to the let-down, the aforementioned verse includes the line Standin’ at my podium, I’m tryin to watch my sodium. Now, I know it’s just one line in one song, not everything has to be lyrically immortal, but when that one line is the only semblance of rap on the record, there’s just no excuse for that kind of weak nonsense.

The guy said in damn near every interview he’s done over the past few months that 808s isn’t for the fans, so I didn’t give it much thought when I moved on to something else. I didn’t listen to it again for a day or two, and was so ambivalent about it I thought about skipping a review entirely. That is, until I found myself unable to get the stomp chorus to Love Lockdown out of my head for the hundred millionth time since first hearing it a few weeks back. Sometimes in those situations, you’ve gotta just go to the source and let it run its course. I did just that, and let the rest of the album play out, listening without pretense. And something was different. It started making sense.

The minimalist opener Say You Will makes it clear right off that a new playbook is in the game. Over six minutes of uncharacteristic pensive hoping over synth tinklings and an ethereal backdrop. At six and a half minutes long, half of it without vocals, it’s no mistake that our introduction to 808s & Heartbreak is a sharp departure from the slick suit of jet-setting cockery we’ve come to expect from Kanye.

Welcome To Heartbreak’s already got me wondering what the hell I was thinking the first time around. This track is damned epic, another sparse instrumental backing a lyrical reflection on the family life West has thus far sacrificed to be a megastar. Moving through a series of comparative circumstances (He said his daughter got a brand new report card / And all I got was a brand new sports car / Dad cracked a joke, all the kids laughed / But I couldn’t hear ‘em all the way in first class), Kanye shares his second-thought regrets at his emotional isolation, trying to shake off those pesky human tendencies to be driven by love and family.

The chorus line (And my head keeps spinnin’ / I can’t stop having these visions / I’ve gotta get with it) is the kind of insanely addictive hook that reminds us why the man’s got such an ego in the first place: the hooks he comes up with aren’t just song anchors- these are barbed little moments of sickness that are bound to do laps in your head for years to come.  That’s what Kanye’s best at (besides ego stroking, of course), and he thankfully doesn’t abandon

The 808 in the title is, obviously, a nod to the Roland TR-808 drum machine which sounds nothing at all like an actual drum kit. The percussive synthetics are a good fit, however, particularly on the ridiculous-hooked Robocop. The latter’s a clever letter of complaint to an overbearing girl, who can’t accept that there’s just some shit she’s not going to know about the man. The cello and chopping strings breakdown is a delicate and refreshingly funny moment of sunlight on an otherwise highly cloudy record. You spoiled little LA girl / You’re just an LA girl / You need to stop it now.

Not every track is a trend-setter. The tribal chorus and big beats of Amazing features a verse by Young Jeezy, but like I said, he should’ve brought his A game or stayed the hell out of it. Lil’ Wayne makes a good impression at first, but ruins everything with kiddie bullshit lines like You think your shit don’t stink / But you Mrs. P.U. Come on.

The most familiar-styled track on 808s, Paranoid, meets the fans halfway with the closest thing to West actually flowing that you’ll find on the album. The production is Neptunes-ish, and the 16ths keep things clipping along at an optimistically quick pace.

The understated big-beat ballad Streetlights is another leap forward into prog-pop, with building percussion, female backup vocals and a pulsing central melody featuring some of Kanye’s most humbled lyrics to date. However, if I hear him sing about life being unfair one more time, I’ll never listen to his shit ever again. If Kanye’s life is unfair, sign me up for a heaping dose of misery.

Arguably best track of the album is Bad News, a strings-rich cheater track with 10,000 megawatts of heartfelt sadness, having discovered that he’s on the losing end of a love affair. While I’m waiting on a dream that’ll never come true / Are you just gonna keep it like you never knew / When’d you decide to break the rules? Cause I just heard some real bad news…

This is one of those songs that will outlive the hits and lock in the skeptics (except those confused, cynical hit-hunters who can’t find any samples to slobber on) in the weeks and months to come. As with the rest of the album, the strengths here aren’t in some slick delivery stuck to multilayered tapestry hung on a wall of sound. It’s the simplicity of the songs, the stripped but potent arrangements that are the real highlights on the record.

Coldest Winter is a jarring dose of tear-jerking brilliance, a speaker-pounding gut punch that’s more potent than anything Kanye’s approached yet in his career. Written for his mother Donda, who died last November, the line Memories made in the coldest winter is undoubtedly a reference to the season of sorrow that set the stage for this new direction in his artistic development.

The version of the album we got closed with a bonus track, a live, mostly-acapella “freestyle” about fame and some ridiculous bullshit about money not buying happiness. Do you think I would sacrifice real life for fame? he asks, and that’s a damn good question, regardless of the rhetorical intent.

The final words of the album- A wise man once said, ‘You’ll find your way’- aren’t there by mistake. Nothing the guy does happens by accident. Kanye’s taking a well-timed moment to clear out his baggage, because he’s carved out a big enough persona to take a sharp left without throwing his career off a skyscraper in the process. 808’s and may be a self-declared piece of genre-defining pop art, but don’t call it a reinvention; he’s not gonna be a slow-jam sad robot crooner forever.

Pop art’s been done, sure. But it’s never been done Kanye style. And on 808s and Heartbreak, with the help of a little humility and introspection, he raises his own game much more than people are going to grasp for some time yet. But that’s OK. He’s not going anywhere.

808s & Heartbreak
November 24, 2008
Rock-a-Fella / Island Def Jam

1. Say You Will
2. Welcome To Heartbreak
3. Heartless
4. Amazing
5. Love Lockdown
6. Paranoid
7. Robocop
8. Street Lights
9. Bad News
10. See You In My Nightmares
11. Coldest Winter
12. Pinocchio Story