Fresh Cherries from Yakima

so, i guess i owe a very public apology to kanye west. in my open letter to rappers that use autotune, i not-so-subtly placed the world premiere-performance of “love lockdown,” the first single from his just-released 808s and heartbreak, as the header of my plea for rappers to stop sounding like cher in “believe” (cher reference courtesy of zilla rocca). of course, this was mainly a knee-jerk reaction, because kanye west– up until the point of “lockdown”– was a rapper, and not only a rapper, but a rapper whose work was founded upon immediacy. so, when i didn’t love “lockdown” (pardon the pun) at first listen, i caved. what the fuck is kanye doing?

then, the song started to grow on me, and i ended up eating my words. the bubbling 808s, the choppy piano line, the skittering marching band drums and claps in the chorus, and– yeah, yeah– the auto-tuned vocal melody, ended up crawling underneath my skin, causing me to sing to myself during the most random and inconvenient intervals, like crooning “you lose” to one of my customers at my day (night) job whenever they bought something that wasn’t on sale.

with all of that said, i still wasn’t exactly feverishly anticipating 808s and heartbreak, even with jeff weiss’ ringing endorsement of the album, with me somewhat writing it off as a bias due to the abundance of booze and naked bitches at the listening party he attended. with enough booze and naked broads in animal masks, i could probably even be swayed to enjoy that katy perry album (i was drunk enough to enjoy “i kissed a girl” a few weekends ago at a club on the eastside, even).

again, i was proven wrong.

808s is definitely the heart-on-sleeve diary of a man who lost the two most important beings in his life over the course of the past year (his mother to a botched plastic surgery, and his longtime companion to a nasty breakup), and you needn’t look past the titles to figure this out: “coldest winter,” “see you in my nightmares,” “welcome to heartbreak,” “heartless.” sasha frere-jones writes about the mechanical and distant distortion effect that autotune has on vocals, but throughout the course of the album, not even autotune can hide the ache and emotion in west’s voice through these tunes. most of the lyrical themes of the album are standard love song fare, but kanye delivers them with such artfully derived musical accompaniment, that the lyrics never seem overtly stale, instead instantly relatable. excepted is “pinocchio story,” which compacts emotion and hurting into a vivid metaphor about a wooden doll, and “amazing,” which is more of a pep-talk gone unconvinced to the protagonist than an actual boast, with young jeezy adding a boast of real confidence, but carefully watching his blood pressure.

i should point out that listening to the album at 4:30am on a saturday night/sunday morning makes the desolate nature of the album all the more palatable.

as the title implies, the album’s use of 808 drums buoy the the album, as well as kanye’s careful attention to polyrhythms; take the subtle drums, coupled with the blips and bloops of “say you will,” the tribal rimshots fluttering around the piano stabs of “bad news” and “amazing,” the post-tv on the radio bounce of “paranoid,” the static and pounding kicks of “coldest winter,” and, of course, the aforementioned “love lockdown,” with “heartless” being the lone obvious nod to modern pop music. it’s also fitting that the music is sparse and minimal, giving west a proper vehicle to expose his naked heart and all of the scar tissue it has experienced over the course of the album.

SUMMARY: i wanted to keep this review short and sweet, because there will be hundreds of thousands– if not millions– of words written about this review, and most of those words will be better than what i have been able to muster. as for the album itself, 808s and heartbreak is the musical and lyrical antithesis of late registration, with the low-key instrumentation and raw feelings dejection and loneliness of the former directly countering the bombast and dense instrumentation of the latter. the best attribute an artist can posses is reinvention, and with 808s and heartbreak, kanye west has again proven why he’s mainstream pop music’s few true artists: he’s a being who never rests on his laurels for the sake of making a dollar, restlessly following whatever his muse is at the time and spending countless hours honing his craft, and creating a slew of artistic triumphs, whether his legions of fans are willing to follow him or not.

and then he convinces us to just trust him.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 7:16 pm and is filed under new album. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.