West is not a gifted singer, but in 2008 he discovered something new with this tactic: In modern pop, a “vocalist” can sound like anything. It was a cycle of studio tricks and primal fear West fixed his mistakes in a way that sounded even more (purposefully) false than before. West’s presence on the album sounds like depression: a songwriter digitizing himself to distraction, nipping off too-big feelings before they render him catatonic. Most famously, West barely rapped on the album, instead singing through a slathering of Auto-Tune meant not to disguise his off-key singing but to underline it. It’s apparent in the sonics - the sub-bass of “Love Lockdown” pulsing like a bad memory, the “Blade Runner” synths of “Paranoid” and “Heartless” promising escape, all barely hiding vacancy and exhaustion. “808s” was recorded quickly and released in the thick of what he’d describe on record as his “coldest winter.” The album, produced with pop and rap hitmakers like Jeff Bhasker and No I.D., is unabashed in its grief and disconnection. That would be enough to send anyone down a black hole of mourning, but it sent West back into the studio. As his stark album cover implies, he’s a songwriter of incredible heart, even when the air’s sucked out of him. 25 and 26, it will be a reminder that the rapper isn’t just the leather-jogging-pants-wearing, free-associative pop culture villain that so many mistake him for. When West plays it in its entirety on Sept. “808s” helped carve out space for wounded, sincere and avant-garde sounds that Drake, the Weeknd, Frank Ocean and a whole generation of artists would take up the charts and into the marrow of modern music. West’s 2008 LP “808s & Heartbreak,” with its mix of emotional devastation and frosty minimal electronics, has turned out to be one of the most influential albums of contemporary pop music. stop would be two nights at the Hollywood Bowl playing, in its entirety, the most provocatively miserable album of his career. So it might perhaps be surprising that his next L.A. That’s just a tasting menu of Kanye moments from the last decade (one to be updated pending his just-announced presidential bid). He’s called himself a god while demanding faster croissant service in song, commandeered stages from Taylor Swift at the VMAs and Beck at the Grammys, married into the Kardashians, said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” at a live Hurricane Katrina fundraiser, and released a merchandise line sporting reappropriated Confederate flags. If nothing else, the name Kanye West means confidence.
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