Two simple synth notes repeat like a game of Pong, back and forth, lending strangeness. The album’s opening track, “Say You Will”, sets the mood well. Or, perhaps more likely, he heard it and just thought it sounded cool, a clear motivating force behind his music from the beginning. Either he listened to modern-day R&B and heard loneliness in the technique, or he heard the tool’s capacity to create a feeling of loneliness and isolation. Instead it’s about getting that science-fiction sound, about his voice bleeding into the cold clang of the drum machine, becoming one with the machine… and then separating from it, at key points. If he were trying to sound like a professional, skilled singer, his whole approach to singing, and to the album, would have been different. Nor is it an attempt at perceived perfection, at seamlessness.
But the way he uses it is not about mimicking others’ success. Perhaps he picked up on this Auto-Tune technique from its current-day popularity among R&B singers (T-Pain, most notably). It is the most meandering track, an uninteresting diary entry without exciting music to bolster it.) (The exception is the album-ending live-freestyle “Pinocchio Story”. The lyrics that hit most, emotionally, are those sung the most straight, like on “Street Lights”. He turns the vocal effects off to sound naked, vulnerable.
In “Welcome to the Heartbreak”, for example, he’s telling stories about life as a lonely celebrity, but it’s the tone of the story that leaves the impression, not the stories themselves. Even the most specific lyrics project feeling more than specifics he sings like this. He turns it on to make his voice cold and robotic, to make it blend in with its surroundings. He turns the most explicit manifestations of these effects on and off throughout the album, not randomly but purposely. One tool he uses to give his voice a particular texture is Auto-Tune, or some similar pitch-correction/voice-filtering software. It’s a stylistic choice, one of many choices he makes to create the album’s distinct atmosphere. The way he sings adds to the album’s mood. Across 808s and Heartbreak, he doesn’t sing like this album is his breakout move to become known as a singer. In both arenas he’s not innately gifted, nor technically proficient. He’s never going to be the next Marvin Gaye, just like he’s never going to be Rakim.
Kanye west 808s and heartbreak professional#
His singing is even less professional than that. His rapping style always had an amateurish, guy-down-the-street quality to it, even though he has progressed in skill with each album. He was a successful producer figuring out a way to rap, so he could make music on his own terms start to finish. It seems cobbled-together, adapted to suit a specific purpose, which is how his rapping was at first, too. West sings on all of the songs, but his singing isn’t as distant from rapping as you might expect. It’s about the heartbreak and the 808s becoming entwined as one sound. It’s about building an aura of heartbreak from a simple machine, by today’s standards: the TR-808 drum machine that was the foundation of so much rap music in the ‘80s. But as the title makes clear, the concept is not just heartbreak, but 808s. West is a multi-million-album-selling artist worried about public image and the paparazzi, after all, and that’s part of the subject here too. The lyrics are generally run-of-the-mill, not that far removed from your average emo band, even if they came from his real-life pains and have a different starting place. The album projects all of these actions and emotions, but it’s the stark yet intricate music that does it best. The songs tell no cohesive story arc, lyrically, though there’s plenty of bitterness, sadness, confusion, betrayal, and the like. It’s a confessional concept album, but one where the mood communicates the concept even better than the lyrics. Across the album, it’s as if he has a compulsion to sing about heartbreak, as if he couldn’t get himself to stop writing one more song about how cold his ex was towards him and how cold he feels now. “I can’t stop having these visions,” a line goes on the second song, “Welcome to Heartbreak”. It’s mostly the latter that these songs cover, though the former no doubt influenced the sad demeanor of the album. The move seems instinctive, from the gut and based on the specific circumstances of his life: his mother passed away and his relationship with his girlfriend dissolved. Kanye West’s first three albums, all with education-themed titles, have been cemented as a true trilogy, not just a nominal one, by the release of his fourth album, 808s and Heartbreak, which moves in a different direction.
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