Kanye West — 808s & Heartbreak

After the release of his third studio album, his mother dies and his longtime girlfriend leaves him. Shocked by these two events that brutally impact his mental health, over the course of three weeks in the fall of 2008, Kanye West records his fourth album. Hip-hop is a genre that can't contain his emotions, and rap is a lyric style that "has limitations", according to West. He discovers two new things: the auto-tune and the Roland TR-808 drum machine, whose heavy and massive use, with sonic distortions that according to the producer create a "heartbreak" effect, gives rise to the title of the album. Kanye West breaks away from hip-hop, rapping and sampling, and decides to make a pop album almost exclusively sung to rhythms built around 808.

The record is self-produced with the help of No ID and Jeff Bhasker: the electropop rhythms made by Kanye West, based on the drum machine and the abuse of synths, sound skeletal, inaccessible and anti-melodic, they are very slow and boring. His lyricism is deeply questionable and annoying, it focuses most of the record on his ended relationship with his ex-girlfriend and dedicates short excerpts to his mother, although it's this loss that marks him more deeply. For over fifty minutes, Kanye West is singing badly and the constant use of autotune does not improve his singing performance and does not hide its defects, exacerbating the annoyance of listening to these experimental rnb songs.

Fifteen years later, it's rightly regarded as one of the most influential albums of the decade, a cult record among Kanye's stans that, as with his entire discography, considers it a watershed CD. Among the songs stands out "Heartless", for detachment the musically best song of the album and one of the worst from the point of view of the lyrics. Three years later, will.i.am steals this song for the Black Eyed Peas and changes its title, inventing "Just Can't Get Enough", whose structure is identical, if you open two tabs on your search engine you notice it more easily. Kanye opens singing overbeat, Fergie does the same thing. The chorus is followed by verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge / break. The flow of will.i.am is the same to that of West. The beat is similar too, with the difference that the Black Eyed Peas one is richer and EDM.

Overall, the album is long, exhausting, and wrong, showing its inability to sing and use autotune. Inspired by T-Pain and the new wave disks of the past, Kanye West jumps on the autotune bandwagon, the new trend of the moment, and releases a horrible, sick and grumpy project, as gray as the cover, which features a heart-shaped deflated balloon in the center, one of its laziest and least inspired covers ever. The album, first in the charts and one of the best-sellers of 2009, is totally rejected by hip-hop aficionados, garnering positive and favorable reviews from most professional critics.