![]() Then various versions, with incremental tweaks, were leaked online. West gave the premiere of the first single, “Love Lockdown,” at the MTV Video Music Awards in September. “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.”Īnd it’s not just the songs that are unmediated much about this album’s release suggested a lack of filters. “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. ![]() “Amazing,” a visceral collaboration with Young Jeezy, sounds as if it were recorded inside a whirring old grandfather clock, a collection of precisely moving parts neatly interlocking classic Kanye. On both “Love Lockdown” and “Coldest Winter,” thunderous drums cut through an electro haze, and “Bad News” features one of the most efficient bass lines Mr. Some of the results suggest his old, oversize sound. ![]() 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. West is done letting himself off the hook. On “808s & Heartbreak,” which was released by Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam on Monday, Mr. On “Breathe In, Breathe Out,” from his 2004 debut album, “The College Dropout,” he distilled the essential struggle that has defined his career into one sharp joke: “Always said if I rapped, I’d say something significant/But now I’m rapping about money, ho’s and rims again.” He rarely aims his daggers at others there’s plenty in the mirror to clown on. On previous albums he’s hilariously taken himself to task for his foibles of style and narcissism. But he is also funny, something, given his profound sense of entitlement, he very rarely gets credit for. West is mouthy, impertinent, flamboyant, bellicose, provocative, greedy and needy. “Do you really have the stamina,” Kanye West wonders to himself on “Pinocchio Story (Freestyle Live From Singapore),” the bizarre rap-star-in-need-of-a-Geppetto hidden track from his fourth album, “808s & Heartbreak,” “for everybody that sees you crying/And says, ‘You oughta laugh! You oughta laugh!’ ?”
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