On 808s, Kanye doesn’t tell stories, and he doesn’t confess anything in any of the ways we’ve come to expect. And yet the collaboration with those devices allowed him to sing real, unfiltered heartbreak - something that he hadn’t yet done in his career, and something that hip hop as a whole had never really dealt with before. Kanye had a style, and the 808 and the Auto-Tune just didn’t jibe with it.
At the time of its release, the final result was rather startling. The album is a close partnership with machine (he used the vintage Roland TR-808 drum machine for his beats) and with a kind of artistic dishonesty (he used the modern Auto-Tune device to adjust his subpar singing voice in nearly every track on the album). On it, Kanye doesn’t say anything we were accustomed to hearing on any hip hop track, and he doesn’t really sound like Kanye. He released it in November 2008, after three hit albums that effectively branded a Kanye style of hip hop - and yet 808s wasn’t really a hip hop album. His fourth studio album, 808s & Heartbreak, is the best musical and lyrical manifestation of Kanye’s need to say everything all at once. His problem - especially outside of the recording booth - has always been the opposite: Kanye has always struggled to withhold (or at least to measure) his confessions. He’s not like Nas, who often sounds shy and characterless in interviews despite being a hell of a storyteller in his rhymes, and he’s not like Eminem, who always depended on his alter ego to share his darkest thoughts. The break beat is, and always has been, a haven for hyper-masculine confessionals that might otherwise go unspoken.īut Kanye West, long as the public has known him, has never needed the break beat to say what he wants to say. recorded a song for his suicide at age 24, or that Jay-Z wrote an entire hit song about not crying, and that each of them felt comfortable doing so on 16 bars. There’s a reason, for example, that Scarface once wrote a song in the form of a diary entry, or that The Notorious B.I.G.
That’s been a component of the story for a long time - recall Sugar Hill Gang’s proud pronouncement, in 1979, that “I got a color TV, so I can see/the Knicks play basketball” - but hip hop verses are also a place for confessions, specifically for those of black men.
KANYE 808S AND HEARTBREAK SHIRT SERIES
Hip hop’s lyrical narrative often gets unfairly abbreviated to being about nothing more than posturing and persona, a never-ending series of mostly meaningless boasts about how nice my rhymes sound, and so on. Part of a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense.
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