When I was arguing about Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak recently, I said that my main problem with it wasn't that I'm a hip hop purist, but that I'm a T-Pain purist. And while it was mainly a quip that sounded good at the time, the more I think about it I realize I was telling the truth. T-Pain and his AutoTuning and vocoding forebears have found ways to make beautiful and creative music with their manipulated voices, but almost everyone who's toyed with the technology in his wake has made garbled digital blather, especially Kanye. I always kind of liked his humble singing voice on "Spaceship" and "Hey Mama," but the ugly tones he make when singing through AutoTune are preferable to nothing, except maybe him rapping about vomit and urine through AutoTune on "Go Hard" and "Swagga Like Us."

And the voice is just the beginning. One of the most brilliant sample-choppers of his generation has decided to make an album almost entirely out of synthesizers and 808s. And while he's made a decent amount of dope beats in the past with those tools, leaning on them entirely, with hardly any samples, only exposes the weaknesses in his craftsmanship. The sad thing is that this year some R&B singers that Kanye has worked with in the past, particularly John Legend and Ne-Yo, have made music that pushed in a direction of dance-influenced soul music with many of the same musical and emotional elements as this album. If he was still a producer for hire on the regular, he could've greatly enhanced the albums they made, and they could have even sung his lyrics and melodies and made them sound much, much better. But instead, he channeled these ideas into a solo project he lacks the skill set to pull off, and ended up with the mess that is 808s & Heartbreak.

The musical problems on 808s wouldn't be as big a deal, of course, if he displayed a fraction of the humor or variety of subject matter of his previous albums. Instead, it's a monomaniacal journey through a breakup, a guy constantly telling his side of the story in a way that only serves to make the unheard other party more sympathetic. You can't build your music and career around a cult of personality, and then make an album completely from the perspective of a churlish, childish, despicable asshole and expect it to not turn people off. There's no unreliable narrator trick to hide behind, just a whining dickhead who's been running around talking about his porn collection and every model chick he smashed for the past 5 years while he was engaged to some poor girl who finally got tired of his tremendous ego. Kanye's always talked a lot of shit to the public, and has been able to mostly back it up with good and great music. But after this repulsive work of immense hubris, I just badly want him to go away, not back to the music he used to make, just go away, at least for a while. He wants listeners of this album to feel his misery, and while I do feel miserable when I hear it, it's not in the way he intends.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 02, 2008 at 9:10 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.