#311 Kanye West - 808's and Heartbreak

I really liked his latest album, and never really heard this one. Also, its a pretty divisive one, so I'm curious to hear what its all about.

In case you hadn't heard, this album features, instead of rapping, Kanye crooning, highly autotuned, over synths. Which sounds terrible. When this came out, I hadn't heard anything by this guy that had impressed me, and this certainly sounded like a recipe for disaster.

In practice, as I hear it today, its actually kind of awesome. There's a lot of the seeds of MBDTF's best moments on here, from the lengthy opener, to the adventurous approach to beats and oilslick rainbow overproduction, to the stripped bare emotional content. Kanye reveals himself, on this album and its followup, to be a tortured, neurotic, bizarre, oversized personality, but one that is strangely relatable somehow. I think in terms of personality, he and I might have a thing or two in common, he just happens to be crazy rich and famous. Or maybe crazy, rich, and famous. And his fears play out on epic stages, blowing up with synths and noise and robot souls.

As far as the infamous autotuning, I think it works pretty well here. It's artificial, but still manages to carry some emotional heft, serving to make Kanye's voice more menacing, more vulnerable, and inexplicably, more human. If nothing else, making this album is such an insane, unusual move that I can't help but at least respect it on that level. Highlights include opener Say You Will, the atmospheric single Amazing, the stompy Love Lockdown, and (especially) the curiously, joyously exuberant Robocop.

Then again, I have to confess I suspect I wouldn't have liked this if I'd heard this when it first came out. MBDTF helps to inform what Kanye was going for here. In the context of that album's opener, its Flashing Lights / Monster freakout, and (especially) Runaway's synthed-to-oblivion confessionals, this album seems like a test run for some of that album's best ideas. On its own, this seems like a bit of a weird, indulgent near-failure - but now it seems like a nascent prequel, the boy that became the man.

I really did not like any of Kanye's college-era albums, finding them grossly, blindingly overrated, and it is baffling to me how much his last album turned me around. I wonder if the dropout/registration/graduation set would sound better to me now, or if his new stuff is just more my style. I can't figure the guy out, and I think that's part of the appeal. If its all part of his plan, point given Kanye. Well played, sir. 4.5/5