“The coldest story ever told/Somewhere far along this road he lost his soul. But aside from one bleak song written for his mom (“Coldest Winter”), 808s & Heartbreak is a breakup album - it’s Kanye’s would-be Here, My Dear or Blood on the Tracks, a mournful song-suite that swings violently between self-pity and self-loathing.
The record arrives in the wake of a year in which Kanye lost his mother and split with his fiancée, designer Alexis Phifer. A bold, fascinating, foolhardy, occasionally unlistenable Kanye West record was inevitable, with or without the cyborg-soul software. But Auto-Tune isn’t totally to blame for 808s & Heartbreak. With Kanye largely abandoning rapping in favor of digitally altered crooning, his fourth album represents a cultural high-water mark for Auto-Tune, that now ubiquitous pitch-correction technology. Kanye West announced long ago that mere hip-hop superstardom was not enough for him - he wanted to be “the number one artist in the world.” So it’s no surprise that his untrammeled egotism has led him well beyond the usual limits of his genre.
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