The impact it has had on both genres is staggering. While other contemporary machines like the Linn LM-1 or the Oberheim DMX typically retailed for about $5,000, the TR-808 came in at a little over $1,000. I spent years believing 808s to be Kanye's weakest and frankly most uninspired album. Even with all of the collaborations, Kanye’s ability to execute and realize his singular vision, forged from personal tragedy and heartache, is a triumph in and of itself. 808s & Heartbreak, an Album by Kanye West. He triumphed over 50 Cent in their manufactured sales battle with his third album, Graduation, which sold just under one million copies in its first week of release. Kanye West's fourth full-length studio album. Released 24 November 2008 on Roc-A-Fella (catalog no. Not to mention, y'all wanna say Kanye birthed Drake but So Far Gone only came out a couple months after 808s and sonically (outside of "Say What's Real") sounds a lot more like Lil Wayne and 90s/2000s R&B than 808s. 808s and Heartbreak was Kanye West's first real attempt at a concept album. On that album’s second single, he proclaimed, “that that don’t kill me can only make me stronger,” but 808s & Heartbreak was about everything that almost killed him making him weaker, more vulnerable, and more suspicious. Kanye’s collaboration with T-Pain would help inspire 808s & Heartbreak, and the rapper turned singer would help coach West on how to use Auto-Tune during the recording process. Soon, 808s would start to flood the second hand market with prices as low as $100, which would allow underground producers and novices with a creative streak to start to unlock the possibilities. The sounds, especially that unreasonably loud bass, became staples in hip-hop, electronic, R&B, and house in the ensuing decades. It can be observed in the output of four of the biggest artists of the moment, Future, Travi$ Scott, Drake and The Weeknd. //]]>, Sorry, we have to make sure you're a human before we can show you this page. The 808s, combined with liberal use of autotune across the album’s twelve tracks, makes for a lonely and melancholic reflection on death, isolation, fame, and, of course, heartbreak. But all of those quirks helped bring about the 808’s future ubiquity in hip-hop music. Two devastating personal events – … With stark production and sung vocals, ‘808s & Heartbreak’ found Kanye West bearing his soul and paving the way for The Weeknd and Drake. On Post’s very on the nose “Rich & Sad,” he similarly laments about how material objects can never bring him happiness: Like many young men, these acts decry all of the things a lost love did to them, without taking full inventory of what they could have done to prevent the breakup from happening in the first place. Auto-Tune was ubiquitous by 2008 thanks to T-Pain and Lil Wayne dominating the charts with monster hits like “Buy U A Drank” and “Lollipop,” but the wave was beginning to crest and was heading toward a crash. Kanye West’s 2008 album, '808s & Heartbreak,' turns ten years old this week. With Kanye’s personal tragedies and new collaborators setting the direction of the production and content, 808s could not have been more different than Graduation in both tone and subject matter. Kanye’s personal loss was the music world’s gain, but here’s hoping that one day he will be made whole again. The album opens with “Say You Will”, a slow and meandering track centered around a beeping synth loop, not unlike the sound of a heart monitor. This week marks the 10 year anniversary of Kanye’s most ambitious album. Rated #51 in the best albums of 2008, and #5638 of all-time album.. Personally I can also attest to the huge influence the album has had on me. Love Lockdown and Blood on the Leaves, headliners from 808’s and Yeezus respectively, share some profound differences in Kanye’s perspective. Follow @genius Without 808s & Heartbreak, we may never have known the robotic trap of Travis Scott or the sad crooning of Drake. Both wildly popular and misunderstood in the moment, 808s inspired a legion of artists that grew up in its wake. He's made 808s and Heartbreak, which as the title hints is an introspective, minimal electro-pop record steeped in regret, pain, and even more self-examination than a typical Kanye West album. Graduation was the culmination of Kanye’s journey from underdog to juggernaut. Both Common’s Electric Circus and Yasiin Bey’s The New Danger were were met with mixed reviews and commercial indifference. The album’s immediate impact was felt the very next year as Drake and Kid Cudi cemented their status as newfound rap stars. 1593 Followers. Inspired by the death of his mother, Donda West, as well as the end of his engagement to Alexis Phifer, the album threw fans and critics for a loop with its radical departure from the sounds that made Kanye famous. ‘808s and Heartbreak’ is one of the most powerful albums about loss made in the second half of the 20th century. 808s and Heartbreak is an R&B album performed by a hip-hop artist. According to Kanye, some people even advised him to do the album under a different name. The intense sense of dread that pervades throughout feels true to life. 808s & Heartbreak was their first collaboration, and likely the most memorable. Another big difference between the 808 and other machines was that it was analog, which means it produced artificial sounds with hardware as opposed to digital, pre-recorded, realistic drum sounds. On “Heartless,” he simultaneously calls a woman a super villain for leaving him while telling her she’ll never find another man as good as him. He ends the song taunting her by calling her a “spoiled little LA girl.” On “Robocop,” he compares a woman to the sadistic fan from Stephen King’s Misery. The impact it has had on both genres is staggering. Mature and minimal, but deceptively complex, 808s & Heartbreak found Kanye enlisting his usual collaborators (Tony Williams, Malik Yusef, Consequence), while adding new voices like Kid Cudi, Mr. Hudson and Esthero to the fold. One thing 808s & Heartbreak did not do was popularize Auto-Tune. I'll be honest. The relatively low price and faulty transistors contributed to the machine’s unique sound. To talk about 808s & Heartbreak, you have to first talk about the aforementioned TR-808.Released in 1980, the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer … On the album’s simplest, and most emotional song, “Coldest Winter”—which samples lyrics from Tears for Fears 1983 song “Memories Fade”—he wonders aloud: In promoting the album, Kanye cited Phil Collins as a source of inspiration, and it’s evident in the crunchy, synthetic, drums, and more specifically Collin’s hit single “In The Air Tonight,” where he tells an ex-lover that he wouldn’t help them if he saw them drowning. West pared down the bombastic maximalism of Graduation to, at times, the most basic sounds imaginable. It was these losses that would inspire the icy, electronic, pop of 808s, which served as an artistic and personal turning point in West’s life. To the point where it’s almost weird. According to Kanye, some people even advised him to do the album under a different name. The album is really uneven and has innovative moments and plain boring moments. The album’s opener “Say You Will” features eerie synths, and intermittent keys, but the literal pulse of the song is the bleep of a heart monitor throughout. Kanye West Embraced Trump While Eminem Dissed Him—They Both Alienated Fans, Meet Ant Clemons, The Mysterious Feature On Kanye West’s “All Mine”, How “Type Beats” Have Changed Hip-Hop Production, stepping far outside of their comfort zones. [CDATA[ HMU 4 BEATZ. It led to the unrealistic percussion that came out of it—kicks that reverberated too loudly and too long, cymbals that sounded like laser blasts from sci-fi films, tinny snares. Another album with extremely soulful production wouldn’t make Kanye the creative genius that he is today. We see Kanye West in a much more emotional and insecure yet simultaneously egotistical position, after the death of his mother and his public breakup with Amber Rose Mr West is in a very insecure position in his life. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.” But broken hearts have always been practical in one regard—their consistent ability to inspire art. It’s easy to draw a direct through line from 808s & Heartbreak to one of 2018’s biggest hits, Juice WRLD’s emo, heartbreak anthem “Lucid Dreams.” Juice WRLD’s album, Goodbye & Good Riddance, similarly deals with life after a breakup. “That album I feel really started to show the genius of Kanye West because he was not seen as a … Most notably, Kid Cudi’s signature hums and general sense of melancholy loomed largely over 808s and helped Mr. Solo Dolo eventually launch his own career. Genres: Electropop, Synthpop, Contemporary R&B. A full decade later, it’s hard to imagine acts like Trippie Redd, Post Malone, and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie or even trap superheroes like Young Thug and Future, without Kanye’s 2008 album. In addition to the TR-808, the vocal plug-in Auto-Tune played a huge role in the album’s innovative sound. The TR-808 became so popular decades after its initial run, despite the artificial nature of its sounds, because it required ingenuity to coax anything that approximated a real feeling from it. “808s” turns 10 on Saturday, but critics certainly haven’t waited for the album’s anniversary to hail it a classic. Not to get too Rap Genius with it, but within 808s is Kanye’s duality of losing his mom to the same beautification industry he had spent his first three albums critiquing while he’s simultaneously accepting the end of his 18-month engagement and six-year relationship with the … The satisfying collection of stadium-ready anthems catapulted him even further into the pop culture stratosphere. He even debuted the T-Pain featured third single “Good Life” with a cameo on HBO’s Entourage. This article has the numbers to prove just how genius and dangerous it truly was. "http":"https";t.getElementById(r)||(n=t.createElement(e),n.id=r,n.src=i+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js",s.parentNode.insertBefore(n,s))}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); Discover more posts about 808s and heartbreak. The Wicked Witch of the West put a spell on his axe to keep him from marrying his true love. Maybe that’s why so many young artists connected with the album in their formative years. There's true moments of genius, then there are moments of looking through the archives and putting shit together," he said. Nine years ago today (Nov. 24), Kanye West released his groundbreaking "808s & Heartbreak" singing album, which was met with polarizing backlash at the time. Less than a year after 808s’ release, Kanye’s Roc-A-Fella big brother Jay-Z would attempt to send the pitch-polishing software to an early grave with “D.O.A. Prepare yourself for an avalanche of articles praising the genius of this record. He changed up his style for 808s and Heartbreak, and has been doing the same with every album since. It’s no wonder, Juice cites 808s as his favorite album of all time. Trading in the warmth of soul samples for the azoic thump of the TR-808 drum machine and traditional hip-hop lyricism for dour pop singing filtered through the artful pitch destruction of Auto-Tune, 808s & Heartbreak would go on to create a new template for hip-hop and pop music that endures a decade later. So all of that underpinned how much of an artistic risk 808s was at the time of its release. In addition to the growing anti Auto-Tune sentiment, some of ’Ye’s contemporaries struggled with experimental albums earlier that decade. Bangers by Mitch. In a 2013 interview with the New York Times, Kanye claimed the album was “super-polarizing and redefined the sound of radio.”. 808s & Heartbreak turns 10 in November 2018. The album, which debuted to very mixed reviews in 2008, is in the midst of a vast critical reappraisal. Follow @genius on Twitter for updates In the decade since the album’s release, there have been very few traces of the smiling, Louis-Vuitton-backpack-clad kid from the Chi who reminded the world that you don’t always need to have street cred to have an authentic hip-hop career. For every “Sexual Eruption” or “Blame It On The Alcohol” there were missteps like Birdman’s regrettable verse on Shawty Lo’s “Foolish” remix, Ron Browz’s Young Joc knockoff “Gimme Twenty Dollars,” and whatever the hell The Game was trying to do on “Red Rockin’.” When you started to see legends like the late, great, Guru, stepping far outside of their comfort zones and injecting Auto-Tune into their music, a course correction was clearly on the horizon. With this, 808s provide aural glimpses and moments of heartbreak that cannot be forgotten—they are plain in sight, harmfully—and situate sexual violence as a terrain that demands a response that is not invested in prior injured states. 808s & Heartbreak is Kanye West’s fourth studio album, released on November 24th, 2008, and it was a base breaker as far as fans were concerned. The album is more navel diving then navel gazing. On “Lucid Dreams,” Chicago rapper Juice WRLD sings: Those lines have a direct parallel to Kanye’s “Heartless,” where he sings: There is one song where Kanye does exhibit a level of personal reflection, it’s the Cudi assisted “Welcome To Heartbreak.” He sings about materialism and feeling unfulfilled: Nowadays, you’re likely to see the dejected tone of “Welcome To Heartbreak” in music by artists like Post Malone.