“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. The hit “Love Lockdown” is powered by thundering tribal drums and vocals that slide from digitized trills into strangled squeals. In “Street Lights,” a haze of distortion floats above tolling keyboard chords and a hammering beat. Kanye constructed the songs using a classic Roland TR-808 drum machine, and the results are a pleasant shock: stark, spacey tracks, which owe far more to Eighties electro and synth pop than anything on hip-hop radio. 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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