1. Kanye Heartbreak

808s & Heartbreak was West’s great pivot: He had promised since 2005 that his fourth album would be called Good Ass Job, the capper to his premeditated hip-hop takeover. But then he evidently threw out this life script. “Hip-hop is over for me now,” he started saying, dismissively, in interviews.

Kanye Heartbreak

“From now on, I want to be seen alongside only the musicians you see in the old black-and-white photographs—Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles.”This was the moment, just after his iconic shutter shades, when all of his vague ideas about fashion, design, and pop art streamlined with his sharper notions about pop music. The project was surprisingly elegant in presentation for something thrown together in less than a month, its minimalist artwork—a lone deflated heart surrounded by grey—acting as a perfect introduction to the bare sounds within. 808s might have been his most complete zeitgeist achievement to date, a crack in time when he was truly, as he once put it, “on the freeway in a fucking plane, in all lanes at all times.”. Kanye is the entirety of 808s this weekend at the Hollywood Bowl, perhaps as a well-timed reminder, of what his peculiar brand of bravery can accomplish at its best. Looking back, it’s easy to see how many point-of-no-return qualities the album had.

He was required to stretch far, far beyond his abilities to make it. Technically, he was (and is) a bad singer, as he readily acknowledged. So he made his voice more palatable and melodic with Auto-Tune, a piece of software that was loathed at the time for its association with T-Pain, a true innovator who became seen, in hindsight, as a happy jester running a fad into the ground. Torrent download gossip girl season 6 episode 6. But after collaborating with T-Pain on the Top 10 hit —and then experimenting with Auto-Tune while playing that song live—West recruited him to help with 808s, essentially making that sound cool again.Tallahassee Pain was only one of the ghosts in Kanye’s machine: Kid CuDi, an art-student dropout, was also brought in to help with the chilly synths and mournful air West was chasing. And 808s marked the birth and flowering of West’s “creative CEO” method of album-making. Late Registration boasted four co-producers, while Graduation had eight, but on 808s, the liner notes exploded: There were at least five co-writers on nearly every song.

To hear producer Jeff Bhasker tell it, there were eight writers in the room when West was turning mumbles into what would become “Love Lockdown” while zoning for hours on that simple, thump-thump-THUMP, boom pattern. That boom is a bedrock sound of hip-hop, but West saw it as a way to propel himself beyond the genre’s walls. “I’m trying to put on those Phil Collins melodies,”, naming the most elusive and least-explored influence on 808s. He was talking about Collins’ synth-like, proto-Auto-Tuned voice, but there’s also a sonic kinship between the hard, sharp, and dry drums that Collins popularized on his earliest solo records and the uncanny explosions in dead space that make up 808s’ beats. Collins first came upon this “gated reverb” drum sound while working on Peter Gabriel’s 1980 track, when the song’s engineer, Hugh Padgham, used a microphone normally used for in-studio communication—something closer to an intercom—and then trapped and snuffed out any overtones with a signal processor called a noise gate.

It made the drum hits both vivid and lifeless, loud sounds that confused our sense of how loud sounds travel. The technique was famously employed on Collins’ signature hit “In the Air Tonight”, which Kanye has covered live. West’s reinterpretation of this effect came from the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Created by Ikutaro Kakehashi and Don Lewis and meant to retail for a consumer-friendly price in the early ‘80s, this microwave-shaped piece of hardware made drum sounds that were laughably simple, at least to the professional drummers who feared that robots were going to replace them. Who would listen to this tinny little boomp and blish and not yearn for the presence of a real drummer? Compared to the much more expensive LinnDrum machine, which struck fear into the bones of session players everywhere, the 808 seemed merely cute.And yet, because it could never replicate drums, it was free to serve other purposes.

It made an elemental shudder when you turned it up loud, sending vibrations up and down packed city blocks. It provided a rough sound that was perfect for an enclosed space with lots of loose rattling parts, like a car. Its brute force and widespread availability in pawn shops helped the 808 to rewrite the rules of hip-hop from the ground up. It is rap’s bedrock boom, and West savvily turned to it the moment he seemed to turn his back on rap completely.

He had one eye on the chilly European pop that had once dominated radio formats and MTV playlists as rap music languished on late-night programming blocks and local stations, but he kept the 808s hits: They were souvenirs from home as well as strewn pebbles that might lead him back. He was quick to point out the implications of these aesthetic choices, name-checking Gary Numan in interviews while observing that “even if I’m harmonizing, it’s still from a nigga perspective.'

Rap music has since absorbed the importance of this distinction into its DNA. The 808s template has seeped into the street-rap groundwater—a realm that West’s music has always had an arms-length relationship to—as a new generation of local artists emerges. Listen to, the two forlorn specs of sound positioned at either channel like the world’s loneliest game of Pong, and then listen to the late South Carolina rapper Speaker Knockerz’, a street hit from 2014 that has racked up more than 37 million YouTube views based largely on his popularity with high school kids. Knockerz’ fan base couldn’t have been further from the New Zealand arenas West was courting with 808s, but in “Lonely”’s four piano notes you hear the youth taking West’s 808s template as gospel.

Young Thug would not exist as we know him without this album; Future’s deserted-astronaut image would not exist without this album. It is impossible to close your eyes when listening to Dej Loaf’s and not hear Kanye’s piping vocal from “Heartless”.

For Lil Durk, Chief Keef, Soulja Boy, and countless others, showing up on a track sounding like you are drowning in the sound of your own voice is now as natural as an introductory ad-lib.Similarly, contemporary R&B would not glower at us from beneath a cloud of discontent and painkillers if not for 808s. The Weeknd made “I Can’t Feel My Face”, a song about the uneasy comfort of numbness, the biggest hit of the summer, and in doing so credited 808s as his spiritual guide, it is “one of the most important bodies of work of my generation.” It has also resonated in artier, post-graduate environs; How to Dress Well, 'I can't fucking believe that that wasn't the most universally praised record of the decade.”. The only thing more influential than the album’s sound might be its tone: bitter, confused, self-pitying, defensive, and accusatory. West, then as now the most fascinating, celebrated, and scrutinized egomaniac in pop culture, managed to perform emotional vulnerability without necessarily demonstrating it. In fact, the lyrical content of 808s remains the least forward-thinking, least transgressive element of the album: For all his talk in interviews about how the record broke down “the ABCs of relationships” and offered a male perspective on the devastation of breakups, it stands as West’s least introspective project. It is a seething mountain of hurt projected at a villainous “you” who has broken Our Hero. There is some self-loathing, but self-loathing, after all, is just egomania with heartburn.In this way, 808s made sullen solitude fashionable again: Most male R&B stars want to be taken seriously as a misunderstood anti-hero now, and in this they are reenacting the public breakdown that West staged without a net.

The bloodied mumbling that stumbled forth from the release of this record is unbroken—whenever a high-profile rapper suffers some sort of titanic emotional loss, we now expect them to respond with open wounds translated through warbling vocal filters. For example, after the public disgrace of his fallout with Ciara and the commercial disappointment of 2014’s Honest, Future revitalized his career with a three-mixtape series this year that felt like his own 808s. Like Kanye, he sounded dejected, but more angry than insular; his bad feelings were personal insults, career setbacks he didn’t deserve. And of course, there is Drake, who emerged near-whole from 808s. There is a line to trace here, and it’s intriguingly irregular: Just as West stumbled upon the 808s sound palette during the long live breakdowns of “Good Life”, where he was called upon to sing T-Pain’s part, Drake hit on his own foggy aesthetic by on his breakout So Far Gone mixtape. Drake’s creative consigliere Noah “40” Shebib remembered being thunderstruck in the studio when that recording went down: “That shit was so impactful to hear him spilling his heart over that kind of production,” he told. 'I was like, 'Yo, fuck it, that shit crazy,' and I ran with that sound.”In retrospect, going from relatively affable T-Pain, to convulsive Kanye, to polished Drake is like watching the evolution of one disruptive idea about what can happen to rappers’ voices when they pass through the center of the genre.

The innovation has shuddered open new spaces, and now artists of all stripes live there. Kanye West has spent the duration of his career attempting to establish his brand as an exacting tastemaker, thought leader, and trendsetter, but it’s possible he made his most impactful statement the moment he fully let his guard down. Pitchfork Music Festivals: /.

Published 2:57 PM EST Nov 23, 2018One of the only good things Kanye West has done this year is collectively remind us that “Paranoid” exists. It’s a song that almost certainly wouldn't make the cut for his set list – if West still played live shows (he’s only made a handful of concert appearances since canceling his Saint Pablo tour in 2016) – a nonsingle, new-wave throwaway from his 2008 album “808s and Heartbreak.”Yet onstage at the Camp Flog Gnaw festival on Nov. 11, suspended in a transparent box midair, West and Kid Cudi – the rapper who West has also credited with crafting the sound of “808s” – muscled through an Autotune-free version of “Paranoid,” an incredibly rare live appearance of a song that isn’t just one of West’s underrated classics, but also emblematic of his most forward-thinking album.“808s” turns 10 on Saturday, but critics certainly haven’t waited for the album’s anniversary to hail it a classic. Books’ worth of essays have been written about “808s” as the precedent for the next 10 years of hip-hop, depicting how West’s moody vocals and minimalist club beats inspired a generation of artists to blur the line between singing and rapping, to overshare their emotions in openly-emo lyrics, to make music that’s simultaneously made to party to and entirely joyless.It’s a lineage that stretches from Drake and the Weeknd to the Soundcloud rap phenomenon of the past few years. And a look at the rappers on top of this week’s Hot 100 reveals just how broad the album’s influence can be extended – would Travis Scott and Juice WRLD be making the same kind of music if it wasn’t for '808s'?While it’s certainly a stretch to credit every time we hear a rapper sing a verse to Kanye West – a claim that the rapper and his massive ego would nevertheless appreciate – it’s undeniable that “808s” was a groundbreaking release. It didn’t seem that way in 2008, when West released a 12-song album that shared few characteristics with his previous three critically and commercially beloved releases, 2004’s “The College Dropout,' 2005’s “Late Registration” and 2007’s “Graduation.”Gone were his trademark soul samples and the flashy crowd-pleasing hits, replaced by spare production and AutoTuned vocals.

West recorded “808s” coming off a series of personal tragedies, including the death of his mother and his split with his fiancee Alexis Phifer, and his melancholy is pervasive throughout the album. Why, listeners asked, was one of hip-hop’s most engaging rappers choosing instead to warp his voice into a robotic monotone and abandon the kind of songs that made him famous to make a synthpop album?As we know now, West was just hearing the future.

“808s” may not have sounded like rap music in 2008, but it absolutely sounds like the kind of genreless, rap-sung, in-my-feelings hip-hop you can hear anywhere in 2018. And as his contemporaries started to imitate him – most immediately with Drake, whose debut mix tape “So Far Gone” dropped several months post-”808s,” with the then-upstart rapper citing West as the release’s biggest influence – West had moved on, taking the experimental impulses of “808s” and pumping them full of hip-hop star power on the album that many see as his magnum opus, 2010’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”More: Is Kanye West still a creative genius? Not on 'Ye'And yet as we also know now, West can and will never release an album such as “808s” again. He’s still oversharing, but now, as heard on his woefully misguided June release “Ye,” it’s his persona talking, not the man himself.

He’s still making spare, troubled beats, but the emotional impact is lost. The sad irony of the “808s” anniversary is that it almost coincided with another West release, the long-delayed “Yandhi,” its release date tweeted out by Kim Kardashian, perhaps because her husband’s slipping fans no longer have any faith in his own promises. Unsurprisingly, we won’t be getting “Yandhi” this week, with West announcing that he was so inspired by his recent performance with Kid Cudi that he was returning to the album to continue tinkering.And while it’s almost certainly too much to hope for an “808s”-caliber release out of 2018 Kanye, the rest of hip-hop hasn’t stopped being inspired by the album. What West needs to prove is whether he'll ever be able to inspire in the same way again.