This album also sort of started the recent wave of sad hiphop we've been getting (Kid Cudi is a good example). as well as super-depressing (Street Lights, Bad News, Coldest Winter, Say You Will). Different lyrics, different music, different artwork, different mood.īut it's still really catchy and fun (Paranoid, RoboCop). It's NOT the standard recycled bullshit over and over again. KANYE WEST 808s & HEARTBREAK LIMITED EDITION (CD) 1 Say You Will 2 Welcome To Hearbreak 3 Heartless 4 Amazing 5 Love Lockdown 6 Paranoid 7 RoboCop 8. Hiphop listeners loooove to hate on this album because they really don't know what to do with it, where to file it. Tracklist with lyrics of the album 808S & HEARTBREAK 2008 of Kanye West: Say You Will - Welcome to Heartbreak - Heartless - Amazing - Love Lockdown. It forced him to write really memorable lyrics & melodies. Limiting himself gear-wise really worked. In a way it reminds me of how Herbie Hancock used vocoder in "Trust Me", very mellow and sad in a way. Every song is great, and they all fit perfectly together.Īnd sonically, it's unlike the rest of his albums (which are fine, but really are a lot more regular hiphop with more epic production).Īutotune is used almost as another instrument and blends with the music perfectly. It's his most honest performance and his most honest writing. One of the best albums (of any genre) of the 2000s. The emotionally raw album may not be the easiest listen among Kanye West’s work, but it is arguably the most innovative and influential album of his career.Haters gonna hate, but this IS Kanye's finest moment. Its astute blend of R&B and hip-hop tropes, paired with heartfelt, emotionally vulnerable lyrics, reshaped the rap and R&B landscapes, profoundly influencing a slew of musicians such as Drake, Young Thug, The Weeknd, and Frank Ocean in its wake. It was released by Def Jam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records on November 24, 2008, having been recorded earlier that year in September and October at Glenwood Studios in Burbank, California and Avex Recording Studio in Honolulu, Hawaii. Greater still was 808s & Heartbreak’s lasting influence on contemporary music. 808s & Heartbreak is the fourth studio album by American rapper Kanye West. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 450,145 copies in its first week. The album proved to be another big hit for Kanye West, though, as it debuted at No.
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The album met with mixed reviews when released, on November 24, 2008, with critics initially scornful of the perceived over-reliance on Auto-Tune and the apparent self-pitying nature of the lyrics. His highly anticipated 2008 album features the heart pounding first single, Love Lockdown. Recorded in California and Hawaii in a mere three weeks, 808s & Heartbreak was the first of Kanye’s albums to feature his “creative CEO” style of recording, boasting over five co-writers on nearly every song. Kanye West returns with his fourth album 808s & Heartbreak.
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The desolate contents of the album were perfectly encapsulated by its minimal artwork, which depicted a deflated and broken heart on a spare grey background.
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West chose to pair these raw, uncompromising and bleak lyrics with a production characterized by minimalist, harrowing synths offset with stark brutalist beats (generated by the titular Roland TR-808 drum machine, a mainstay of early 80s hip-hop and synth-pop) alongside various offbeat additions such as taiko drums and monk choirs. Opener “Coldest Winter” deals harrowingly with the loss of his mother, who’d passed away due to complications with cosmetic surgery: “Goodbye my friend, I won’t ever love again/Never again,” he sings, while the bitter aftermath of his break-up with Phifer is addressed on the likes of “Robocop” and “Heartless.” “Welcome To Heartbreak,” meanwhile, was a distraught missive from a man coming to terms with the shallowness of his life, his dreams of success beginning to turn into a nightmare: “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs/… Look back on my life and my life gone/Where did I go wrong?”