Kanye West, Flaunting Pain Instead of Flash

Kanye West’s new album, “808s & Heartbreak,” addresses recent events from his life, to a sound leaner and looser than that of his previous records.


By JON CARAMANICA
Published: November 24, 2008
“Do you really have the stamina,” Kanye West wonders to himself on “Pinocchio Story (Freestyle Live From Singapore),” the bizarre rap-star-in-need-of-a-Geppetto hidden track from his fourth album, “808s & Heartbreak,” “for everybody that sees you crying/And says, ‘You oughta laugh! You oughta laugh!’ ?”

Oughtn’t he, though? Mr. West is mouthy, impertinent, flamboyant, bellicose, provocative, greedy and needy. But he is also funny, something, given his profound sense of entitlement, he very rarely gets credit for.

On previous albums he’s hilariously taken himself to task for his foibles of style and narcissism. He rarely aims his daggers at others; there’s plenty in the mirror to clown on. On “Breathe In, Breathe Out,” from his 2004 debut album, “The College Dropout,” he distilled the essential struggle that has defined his career into one sharp joke: “Always said if I rapped, I’d say something significant/But now I’m rapping about money, ho’s and rims again.”

On “808s & Heartbreak,” which was released by Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam on Monday, Mr. West is done letting himself off the hook.

The product of a tumultuous year in his personal life, it operates solely on the level of catharsis — no commentary, no self-consciousness, no concern for anything but feeling. On “Pinocchio Story” he continues his lament:

There is no Gucci I can buy

There is no Louis Vuitton to put on

There is no YSL that they could sell

To get my heart out of this hell

And my mind out of this jail

On any of Mr. West’s earlier albums, he would have quickly undermined this sentiment — of course a shopping spree would cheer him up — but here, bluntness is the goal. And so, as he’s dismantling his storytelling structures, he’s also making his productions skeletal, and largely trading bombastic rapping for vulnerable singing.

“808s & Heartbreak” sounds like none of his other albums, nor any rap album of note — “minimal but functional” is how he has described it to MTV. At best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. At worst, it’s clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose. After all, what is Kanye West without scale?

Mr. West would have been forgiven for taking a break after releasing “Graduation,” his third album, last year. His mother, Donda West, died last November following complications from plastic surgery. In April Mr. West split from his fiancée, Alexis Phifer. By any measure, these are seismic changes, yet he persisted with recording.

Some of the results suggest his old, oversize sound. On both “Love Lockdown” and “Coldest Winter,” thunderous drums cut through an electro haze, and “Bad News” features one of the most efficient bass lines Mr. West has ever constructed. “Amazing,” a visceral collaboration with Young Jeezy, sounds as if it were recorded inside a whirring old grandfather clock, a collection of precisely moving parts neatly interlocking — classic Kanye.

Mr. West has cited the electro-pop pioneer Gary Numan and T J Swan, who sang exuberant, nasal hooks on many a 1980s Queens rap track, as vocal reference points for this album, though in truth hearing Mr. West try to sing these songs is far weirder.

Still, it is not quite sui generis. Early New Edition comes to mind. And in places, especially on the breezy, slick “Paranoid,” this music is redolent of the chilly, slightly irregular R&B the producers the Neptunes were making four or five years ago, for Kelis, Omarion and others. Their synth-driven electro had blasts of funk momentum. But Mr. West uses electro (the title’s “808” refers to the Roland TR-808 drum machine) for its sparseness, so that he might emote unchallenged.

Flaunting pain requires a sort of arrogance, too, so it’s little surprise that Mr. West takes to it so naturally. Every song on the album is rife with anguish, and his lyrics, about the shards of broken relationships, though often tediously written, can carry a fresh sting.

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