Following Graduation was always going to be tricky for Kanye West. It sits as one of his most interesting albums, perhaps the best work he will ever put out. An electropop push with the same collaborative design appears on 808s & Heartbreak, though the divisive spirit still stands. The controversy of those autotune pickings, of the electropop move and shift away from fundamental hip-hop influences, stands as a fascinating moment for West. From the clinical heartbeat sound of opener Say You Will to the Lil’ Wayne-featuring See You in My Nightmares, it is a bold piece of work which puts West in the spotlight as a singer-songwriter more than it does a pop rap artist. The switch may have been brief, but what a change it is. Those detached electronic tones may feel underwhelming at first but they feed the burning passion heard on this fourth album from West.
The Kid Cudi-featuring Welcome to Heartbreak is a mature take on lost loves and what to do in the wake of that emotional grief, the triple flashbang of grief from loss, the breakdown of love and a spotlight on his every moment. Some of the best works come from tragedy and the inability to grieve privately, and 808s & Heartbreak is no exception. Moments which fundamentally change a person, those unexplainable, volatile experiences which West puts down well here, but fails in future instalments of his discography. 808s & Heartbreaks has, if anything, gotten better over the last decade. His 1980s pop-inspired choice is a bold move, as is the reliance on the ultimately crucial Roland TR-808, but perhaps not the most unexpected avenue for West to follow after the Steely Dan samples preceding this album. It is easy to compartmentalise each track here into which round of grief West is dealing with but by shuffling them and keeping a few narratives burning at once, he builds a sweet complexity.
Auto-tuned tones for Love Lockdown make all the difference – the artificial richness here is enough to display the hollow love but not enough to overwork the track or steal away from the incredible drum machine pieces. Like it or not, 808s & Heartbreaks opened the door to the emotional sucker punch which is now commonplace in the genre and all its sub-categories. West is to thank for that, and the repetitive likes of Amazing are as shocking as they are a welcome change of pace. Paranoid, too, has the fundamentals of an 80s pop riff but the attitude and tempo changes are the crucial difference. It keeps West fresh, those daring lyrical choices where he positions himself as a vulnerable man in the spotlight, are as ambitious as they are open. It is the obvious positives which make the difference here, the joy of 808s and Heartbreaks is West lets his guard down.
Much of this album is a reflection on how far West has come and how indifferent he feels now he is at the peak; at the point he wanted to be. Street Lights is likely the best of the bunch to detail this, the drum machine and the electropop feel of the instrumentals surrounding a passive, travelling song marks one of many thrills to be found on this fourth West record. He follows up Graduation not with a rejection of the achievement but an acceptance of a new tone in his life, a new public persona which would slowly but surely unravel into the crash of poor releases just a decade later. But head back to a time when the spotlight was fresh and exciting, West manages to keep it together under the public pressure all the while making sure 808s & Heartbreaks does not buckle under the waves of bad news.
