A slight pitch correction could have done the trick.
![808s and heartbreak type beat 808s and heartbreak type beat](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/fb/c5/1c/fbc51c4efca58da3e3321cc6aab28f73.jpg)
This noble failure of an album might easily have been a noble success if he had tweaked the Fun-o-Meter just a bit. Kanye the Songbird has forgotten the lesson that Kanye the Rapper taught his listeners: Heartbreak is not incompatible with wit, or with sharply drawn details, or with a buoyant beat. But in his most touching songs - “Through the Wire,” “Family Business,” “Hey Mama” - he tucked his confessions in between boasts and jokes. there is no Louis Vuitton I could put on. “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs.” The low point is the freestyle “Pinocchio Story,” recorded live in Singapore, which finds Kanye bellowing, “There is no Gucci I could buy. Many of his best songs have focused on his ambivalence about materialism, but on 808s & Heartbreak, the theme has hardened into schtick. Like many sad sacks, Kanye likes the sound of his own whimper, and mistakes sentiments such as “I could never seem to find what real love was about” for profundities. In “Bad News,” Kanye’s digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he’s become less than human. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn’t just sharpen flat notes: It’s a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness, and upping the pathos. Kanye can’t really sing in the classic sense, but he’s not trying to. But here, the drear never lifts, and he never stops wallowing.Ĭ'mon Guys, Kanye West Isn't Selling Clothes Out of Garbage Bags - They're Obviously Construction Bags How could you be so heartless?” he sings in “Heartless.” Kanye has often chosen introspection and self-exposure to the usual gangsta posturing. “The coldest story ever told/Somewhere far along this road he lost his soul. But aside from one bleak song written for his mom (“Coldest Winter”), 808s & Heartbreak is a breakup album - it’s Kanye’s would-be Here, My Dear or Blood on the Tracks, a mournful song-suite that swings violently between self-pity and self-loathing. The record arrives in the wake of a year in which Kanye lost his mother and split with his fiancée, designer Alexis Phifer. On it, Kanye doesn’t say anything we were. He released it in November 2008, after three hit albums that effectively branded a Kanye style of hip hopand yet 808s wasn’t really a hip hop album. But this, this is what 808s and Heartbreak was always meant to be. His fourth studio album, 808s & Heartbreak, is the best musical and lyrical manifestation of Kanye’s need to say everything all at once. It's seen in some songs like Coldest Winter and the way he structured the album seems somewhat inspired by classical plays, but overall I don't know if the effect was quite felt.
![808s and heartbreak type beat 808s and heartbreak type beat](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eDfu0-Z4e5U/maxresdefault.jpg)
A bold, fascinating, foolhardy, occasionally unlistenable Kanye West record was inevitable, with or without the cyborg-soul software. And, as much as I love 808s, I'm not sure if Kanye quite achieved what he was going for. But Auto-Tune isn’t totally to blame for 808s & Heartbreak. With Kanye largely abandoning rapping in favor of digitally altered crooning, his fourth album represents a cultural high-water mark for Auto-Tune, that now ubiquitous pitch-correction technology. Kanye West announced long ago that mere hip-hop superstardom was not enough for him - he wanted to be “the number one artist in the world.” So it’s no surprise that his untrammeled egotism has led him well beyond the usual limits of his genre.