Reviews

Kanye West - 808’s and Heartbreak

In September 2007, Kanye West made a major breakthrough: After conquering charts and capturing hearts with two huge, deeply flawed near-masterpieces, he delivered his first perfect album. Graduation, a daring synthesis of French house-skewed disco and the familiar feel-good hypersoul dude made his name on, was as relentlessly pleasurable as West’s previous records while simultaneously adhering to the concise framework of all great rock albums since the Beatles practically invented the idiom in the sixties – thirteen tracks in under fifty minutes, stylistically varied and gushing with equal amounts of lust and love.

A little over a year later, West strikes again with 808’s and Heartbreak and here’s the real skinny: It’s even better.

I spent the first few months of 2008 working the graveyard shift at a suburban gas station. The only real perk of the job, aside from the pleasant solitude that draws night owls to that kind of work in the first place, was the hour between 5 and 6 a.m., when all of my work was completed and I was free to contemplate the latest edition of the Chicago Sun-Times before my regulars woke up and started pouring in for weak coffee and partially frozen donuts. It was on just such a cold, lonely morning that I learned of Donda West’s death. I’m not often moved by the trials and tribulations of celebrities, but this particular bit of news left me crushed I never could have anticipated.

Over those first three records, Kanye immortalized his mother. For all the conflict obviously raging inside the man (commerce vs. art, the moral life vs. the good life), one aspect of his personality was never in doubt: Dude was a hardcore mama’s boy. Whether it was the perverse fascination with college that served as the apparent impetus for so many of his early songs (Donda West was an English professor, and while her son may have dropped out of college, he was indelibly stamped with the passion for learning that such an upbringing inevitably impinges upon a young person’s consciousness) or the almost awkwardly emotional dedication of Late Registration’s “Hey Mama” (an entirely different kind of “rawness” than one typically expects from mainstream hip-hop), West made no bones of how important his relationship with his mother was. When the world found out that she had passed away as a result of complications from plastic surgery, it was obvious that the extremely traumatic event would send ripples into Kanye’s art.

Add to that the dissolution of a long-term engagement, and you have a perfect storm of despair. 808’s and Heartbreak represents the culmination of some long months of soul-searching and incredible sadness – eleven tracks of robotic drumbeats and Auto-Tune tweaked vocals. While the record may seem like a potentially devastating curveball flung at West’s trad-minded legion of followers, what it really represents is the logical next step in the man’s culmination as a real artist.

First things first, though: the Auto-Tone. Recently made ubiquitous by T-Pain (though also featured on the most recent Avenged Sevenfold record, to give you an idea of exactly how ubiquitous), “Auto-Tune” refers to the pitch-shifting mechanism built in the Pro-Tools software that, when deployed with moderation, allows producers to “fix” the imperfect vocals of their clients. When jacked to the max, however, it takes a normal human voice and makes it sound robotic. So now we have Kanye masking his obvious emotional pain with this device for almost an hour, which sounds unbearable but actually works far better than we had any right to expect. Not only does the consistently android quality of the vocals work thematically, but it opens up a great conversation, for anyone that wishes to partake, about what we as listeners will accept in regards to stylized content.

For instance: My Bloody Valentine, to much indie-crowd fanfare, reunited this year and began playing shows again. You’d be hard-pressed to find any dissenters claiming that because Kevin Shields and company built their sound on huge washes of distorted guitar, all tremolo and reverb, that their artistic achievements were any less credible; on the other hand, internet message boards have been afire with very vocal doubts about how successful any album relying so heavily on vocal distortion could possibly be. Is it ironic that such aesthetic distinctions are being bandied about in regards to a genre that is possibly the most gloriously, unrepentantly synthetic in all of modern music? Possibly. Is it completely ridiculous? Arguably. Am I going so far as to somehow brand 808’s and Heartbreak a form of hip-hop shoegaze? Absolutely. I’m also willing to venture that it is just as massively revolutionary, on a purely aural level, as MBV’s Loveless was in 1991. Sue me.

Any arguments that 808’s and Heartbreak doesn’t qualify as the kind of deep classic break-up record that Kanye so desperately wants it to, simply because it’s “timelessness” isn’t immediately apparent, are ridiculous. Only time will tell how the record holds up; I’m speaking to you from the year 2008, in the month of November, and at the tail-end of a very good year for music, I can honestly say to you that this is the best thing I’ve heard. Part of that is a natural bias – I love Kanye West. I’ve spent more time in the last four years listening to his records than possibly any other artist, and I didn’t do that because of the usual rockist quest for self-identification through art. I did it because they were great fucking records, and they wormed their way into my subconscious through sheer force of brilliance. I didn’t make any effort to listen to these records; I didn’t try to glean any wisdom or insight from them. Everything that I got out of them was absorbed naturally through endless repetition, simply for the sake of hearing great music that somehow described my life, even though no obvious parallels could be drawn (without serious intellectual reaching) between Kanye West’s globe-trotting superhero lifestyle and my own residence at various gas stations and fast food establishments in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.

Some things don’t make sense; some things just feel right. This album feels right. From the very first track, “Say You Will,” the record is so shocking and compelling that I don’t see how anyone could fail to respond to it. The arrangements are spare and elemental; the drums pound more than they click – this is music that sounds effortless but was probably incredibly difficult to make. To even conjure this sort of mood and then sustain it for eleven tracks, while at the same time being totally unafraid to veer into the kind of fun and braggadocio that West has long been known for – is that a line anyone else on the pop culture stage could even attempt to walk, let alone succeed at so fucking flawlessly?
I’m resisting the temptation to go through each track and point out exactly why they’re great; I probably couldn’t do that even if I tried. The brilliance of 808’s and Heartbreak is ephemeral and situational. Like any Kanye West record, it will become part of your life’s fabric. Dig even a few inches past the obvious (the Auto-Tuned vocals, the seemingly simplistic instrumentation), and it’s not hard to see that this was probably the hardest record for West to make, and it has the potential to pay the greatest dividends. It’s not a record that I care to criticize or evaluate in any logical way; to me, it’s the final cementation of West’s place in the league of geniuses. 808’s and Heartbreak is as intelligent as it is soulful, and it presents the greatest challenge yet to other artists in the medium: Dare they step to this? Can anyone possibly challenge Kanye for the throne – not just of rap, or of music, but of entertainment in its totality?

For somebody trying to pass for an android, dude has heart to spare. And there’s not a studio effect in the world that can hide it.

© 2008 Strong Words INC.