808s & Heartbreak – Kanye West ★★★½

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2008	808s And Heartbreak	Kanye West	★★★½	71	Hip-Hop	R&B

I know 808s & Heartbreak — Kanye West’s first venture into the R&B world — isn’t for everyone. But — when looking back at where hip-hop went in the 10-15 years after 2008 and how prominent R&B production, auto-tuned vocals and deep, dark synths have been — it’s probably one of the most influential hip-hop records of its time. 

808s & Heartbreak sparked Drake’s emotional R&B tracks, which gave him the range to become a megastar one year later. The use of auto-tune inspired all the sad-robot vocalists who popped up from 2010-2012, like Future, and the drill rappers like Chief Keef, who used it more as a sound effect than for pitch correction. The style and sounds paved the way for Travis Scott’s dark, booming production, as well as the emotional and unhinged performances by emo rappers like XXXTentacion, Lil Uzi Vert and Juice Wrld. 

Of course, Kanye West wasn’t the first person to use auto-tune to manipulate his voice. Ignoring its previous use in indie pop and electronic music, T-Pain was really the pioneer of the technique in the hip-hop world, which he used to create standout choruses on chart-topping singles from 2005-2010. Earlier in 2008, Kid Cudi laid the foundation of what would be 808s and Heartbreak with “Day and Nite” (Kanye signed Cudi to GOOD Music later that year), while  Lil Wayne used auto-tune to change his sound on his single “Lollipop,” which in part inspired Kanye to use autotune on Jeezy’s single “Put On” that summer, as well as a “Lollipop” remix.  

But 808s and Heartbreak was the first full project to fully embrace the emotion and topics of R&B while blending it with the flair of popular hip-hop. It wasn’t Wayne just using it as a texture on a handful of tracks, or T-Pain adding a show stopping chorus to a mega hit, or a single soft moment on an otherwise conventional hip-hop album.  It was a fully formed R&B record, mixed with the flourishes of Kanye’s creative and lush production. 

That’s on full display on the album’s opener, “Say You Will,” a dark ballad with a sad string section, backing chants from a live choir, and a repeated drum rhythm and beep that represents a heartbeat and heartbeat monitor.  Kanye emotionally sings about craving to reconnect with someone, even if it means that relationship has entirely devolved into desperate hookups and excuses to talk. As is expected with any Kanye song, some of the lyrics are a little questionable or miss the mark, but they’re catchy, and the emotion on this track and others feels authentic and raw and more vulnerable than he’d ever been before. 

That could be said about the majority of the album. Lyrics on “Welcome to Heartbreak” — juxtaposing the loneliness he feels through his rich lifestyle and fame with his friends who have more basic, but thriving family lives — are effective, even if lines like “My friend showed me pictures of his kids, and all I could show him was pictures of my cribs. He said his daughter got a brand new report card, and all I got was a brand new sports car,” are pretty basic. The song works though musically, and with featured vocals by Kid Cudi it’s an emotional highlight for the album.  

My favorite track on the record is “Street Lights,” a cold piano ballad with a soft, building pulse of feedback that’s simple musically compared to the more grand productions elsewhere on the record and lyrically repetitive. But the repeated chorus — “Seems like street lights, glowing, happen to be, Just like moments, passing, in front of me, So I hopped in the cab and I paid my fare, See, I know my destination, but I’m just not there” — is so perfectly basic and reflective that it captures those lonely, aimless  feelings flawlessly. Kanye’s heavily distorted vocals here also represent how buried in thought or memories he is, while soulful, pure backing vocals by Esthero and Tony Williams fade in and out with clarity. 

The four singles on the record also do a good job at showing off the different styles on the album. “Paranoid” is one of the more upbeat tracks and features some bright pop synths and an 80s drum loop. “Heartless” is the more emotional but catchy single with cute electronic instruments and a bouncy bass line.  The tribal drumming and backing effects in “Love Lockdown” make for a raw, dark, dancy club hit. And the swagger on “Amazing” mixed with Jeezy’s feature gives the album one moment that’s closer to traditional hip-hop while still fitting in with cold, 808 production. 

Outside of “Street Lights” though, the second half of the album does trail off a bit in quality. 

“Bad News” is kind of cool and has a nice instrumental bridge, but hits a lot of the same musical tones as “Street Lights” without the emotional impact. “See You In My Nightmare” similarly reiterates some of the hip-hop feelings on “Amazing,” and while it’s nice to hear Wayne and Kanye on tracks together the verses are a bit overdone and the beat is pretty heavy handed compared to the rest of the album. 

“RoboCop” is obnoxiously corny, with these frolicking synths that feel like an over-the-top Christmas-song at a department store and cringy lyrics calling a girl a RoboCop because of how she interrogates his actions and how “I ain’t used to being told, “Stop,” so I could never be your robot.” It’s rough. 

I’ve also always felt “Coldest Winter” would be a fine and fitting end to the album, but for some reason Kanye adds a live recording of “Pinocchio Story” to close things out. It’s a ballad so I get thematically it fits into the record, but the low quality concert recording is irksome on what’s otherwise a pretty pristine sounding record.  I may have been more open to the track had it been a studio take, even if some of the rawness of his original freestyle performance was missing. 

Overall, the album showed Kanye’s ability to once again break into a space where people said he wouldn’t be able to have success. They said he couldn’t be a producer, then they said he couldn’t rap, then they said he couldn’t design clothes and then they said he couldn’t sing. Even if he’s getting some assistance from autotune, he was about to produce genuinely artistic R&B backing tracks, convey deeply emotional performances and write sing-along melodies that have inspired other artists in the years since.