good music get! kanye west - 808s & heartbreak

It’s said that when Kanye was writing, producing, and rapping for his debut album, The College Dropout, that record companies initially felt that he wasn’t marketable as a rapper because he didn’t portray the “street culture” in his music enough. Interestingly enough, the first song on Kanye’s first album is about selling drugs to get by, even though Kanye has probably never had to sell drugs to make it.

So did Kanye create a fake image for himself to be marketable? Not necessarily but close, as he has a few single songs that must have been created for the sake of appearing to be “hard” to his audience and I suppose his contemporaries, although I’d whole-heartedly say that his production values dwarf most of the typical crap his “friends” produce.

In The College Dropout, Kanye heavily bashes the conception that college is an essential part of life and necessary for being successful. It’s apparent that West hates the educational process and especially paying for it. When Kanye dropped out of college, he had one goal and that was to make as much money as possible producing and rapping.

His dream came true as he’s an extremely wealthy today, and I’m sure he worked hard for it. However, it’s clear that Kanye wasn’t as socially conscience as he could have been about his music, and even clearer that Kanye regrets some of the songs he’s produced.

I can back these claims by simply asking you to listen to Kanye’s new album; 808s & Heartbreak as Kanye lost his Mother to plastic surgery and he broke it of with his fiance all in the same year he was making the album. While you could say that plenty of other people have faced much more pain than Kanye, you can’t ever measure pain based on how much pain you perceive someone to be in. Kanye may be famous and he may have done and said some jack ass things in his past, but one thing is for sure, Kanye is undoubtedly human and these tragedies have heavily effected his music.

Kanye doesn’t rap on the new record and he doesn’t use any expletives. He uses a controversial auto-tuner to modify his voice and most of the percussion on the album is done with tribal time signatures. West even utilizes entire string accompaniments throughout 808s & Heartbreak and almost every song has the auto-tuner adjusted.

Sonically the album is almost perfect as his production and instrumentation are some of the best he’s ever done. Lyrically, Kanye has never shined, but when he sings things like, “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/ All I had was pictures of my cribs”, you can’t help but feel empathy towards the man since he’s cursing his past vanity. Kanye even touches base on how terrible he feels about focusing on the wrong things in life and how much he regrets not spending time with the important things versus the material and lustful.

The album is an incredible accomplishment in Kanye’s career and even though comparatively speaking it’s a commercial and critical failure standing up against Kanye’s first three records, it doesn’t matter, because for the first time in Kanye’s career he produced music for no one other than himself and he has undoubtedly created his best album yet.

It’s a pop album about heartbreak, and it’s one of the best. Kanye has crafted something special and one can only hope that dismal records sales don’t sway West from creating from the heart again.