It was released by Def Jam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records on November 24, 2008, having been recorded earlier that year in September and October at Glenwood Studios in Burbank, California and Avex Recording Studio in Honolulu, Hawaii. A slight pitch correction could have done the trick.808s & Heartbreak is the fourth studio album by American rapper Kanye West. 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. But here, the drear never lifts, and he never stops wallowing. 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. A bold, fascinating, foolhardy, occasionally unlistenable Kanye West record was inevitable, with or without the cyborg-soul software. 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.
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