Kanye West - 808's & Heartbreak (Full Album) HQ. HolographicSweater; 12 videos; 474,000 views; Last updated on Jul 3, 2017.
Published 2:57 PM EST Nov 23, 2018 One of the only good things Kanye West has done this year is collectively remind us that “Paranoid” exists. It’s a song that almost certainly wouldn't make the cut for his set list – if West still played live shows (he’s only made a handful of concert appearances since canceling his Saint Pablo tour in 2016) – a nonsingle, new-wave throwaway from his 2008 album “808s and Heartbreak.” Yet onstage at the Camp Flog Gnaw festival on Nov. 11, suspended in a transparent box midair, West and Kid Cudi – the rapper who West has also credited with crafting the sound of “808s” – muscled through an Autotune-free version of “Paranoid,” an incredibly rare live appearance of a song that isn’t just one of West’s underrated classics, but also emblematic of his most forward-thinking album. “808s” turns 10 on Saturday, but critics certainly haven’t waited for the album’s anniversary to hail it a classic.
Books’ worth of essays have been written about “808s” as the precedent for the next 10 years of hip-hop, depicting how West’s moody vocals and minimalist club beats inspired a generation of artists to blur the line between singing and rapping, to overshare their emotions in openly-emo lyrics, to make music that’s simultaneously made to party to and entirely joyless. It’s a lineage that stretches from Drake and the Weeknd to the Soundcloud rap phenomenon of the past few years.
And a look at the rappers on top of this week’s Hot 100 reveals just how broad the album’s influence can be extended – would Travis Scott and Juice WRLD be making the same kind of music if it wasn’t for '808s'? While it’s certainly a stretch to credit every time we hear a rapper sing a verse to Kanye West – a claim that the rapper and his massive ego would nevertheless appreciate – it’s undeniable that “808s” was a groundbreaking release.
It didn’t seem that way in 2008, when West released a 12-song album that shared few characteristics with his previous three critically and commercially beloved releases, 2004’s “The College Dropout,' 2005’s “Late Registration” and 2007’s “Graduation.” Gone were his trademark soul samples and the flashy crowd-pleasing hits, replaced by spare production and AutoTuned vocals. West recorded “808s” coming off a series of personal tragedies, including the death of his mother and his split with his fiancee Alexis Phifer, and his melancholy is pervasive throughout the album. Why, listeners asked, was one of hip-hop’s most engaging rappers choosing instead to warp his voice into a robotic monotone and abandon the kind of songs that made him famous to make a synthpop album? As we know now, West was just hearing the future. “808s” may not have sounded like rap music in 2008, but it absolutely sounds like the kind of genreless, rap-sung, in-my-feelings hip-hop you can hear anywhere in 2018. And as his contemporaries started to imitate him – most immediately with Drake, whose debut mix tape “So Far Gone” dropped several months post-”808s,” with the then-upstart rapper citing West as the release’s biggest influence – West had moved on, taking the experimental impulses of “808s” and pumping them full of hip-hop star power on the album that many see as his magnum opus, 2010’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” More: Is Kanye West still a creative genius?
Not on 'Ye' And yet as we also know now, West can and will never release an album such as “808s” again. He’s still oversharing, but now, as heard on his woefully misguided June release “Ye,” it’s his persona talking, not the man himself. He’s still making spare, troubled beats, but the emotional impact is lost. The sad irony of the “808s” anniversary is that it almost coincided with another West release, the long-delayed “Yandhi,” its release date tweeted out by Kim Kardashian, perhaps because her husband’s slipping fans no longer have any faith in his own promises. Unsurprisingly, we won’t be getting “Yandhi” this week, with West announcing that he was so inspired by his recent performance with Kid Cudi that he was returning to the album to continue tinkering. And while it’s almost certainly too much to hope for an “808s”-caliber release out of 2018 Kanye, the rest of hip-hop hasn’t stopped being inspired by the album.
What West needs to prove is whether he'll ever be able to inspire in the same way again.
Remember when threatened to make an album where he would bear his heartbroken soul, align with, sing on every song with the then inescapable Auto-Tune effect and, less problematically, lean on the common element - the Roland TR-808 drum machine - of classics like 'Make It Last Forever,' 'Posse on Broadway,' '808,' and 'Bossy'? It would have been a wreck, a case of an artist working through paralyzing heartache while loose in a toy store. Except wasn't joking. Not only did he go through with it, but Roc-A-Fella released the result in time for the 2008 Christmas shopping season. It was indeed a wreck, if a kind of fascinating one, which helped make the material - voiced by someone who could not really sing, whose substantial shortcomings were not made less obvious by a polarizing studio device - seem a little less difficult on the ears. In various spots across, the constant flutter of 's processed voice, along with a seldom interrupted sluggish march of aching sounds, is enlivened by the disarming manner in which despair and dejection are conveyed.
When, in 'Welcome to Heartbreak,' he dispassionately recounts sitting alone on a flight, ahead of a laughing family, he makes first class sound like Siberia; he'd swap lives with the father in an instant. The majority of the lyrics, however, are directed at an ex who evidently did some damage; in 'RoboCop' alone, she gets compared to the antagonist in Misery and is called a 'spoiled little L.A. Earlier in the album, the number she did on him is called 'the coldest story ever told,' yet he admits he still fantasizes about her. All the blocky drums, dragging strings, droning synths, and joyless pianos lead to a bleak set of productions - even the synthetic calliope in 'Heartless' is unnerved, and the relative pep of 'Paranoid' provides no respite, its bitter lyrics subverting a boisterous beat.
Several tracks have almost as much in common with irrefutably bleak post-punk albums, such as 's and 's, as contemporary rap and R&B. ('Coldest Winter,' where longs for his departed mother, samples the most desolate song from the first album.) For anyone sifting through a broken relationship and self-letdown, this could all be therapeutic.
Otherwise, no matter its commendable fearlessness, the album is a listless, bleary trudge along 's permafrost.