In Which I Fawn Over Kanye West

I’ve written about Kanye West before, generally positively. Recently I have been listening to his new album, 808s & Heartbreak (my thoughts below), and in looking for some reviews online I happened upon this one by Ann Powers in the LA Times music blog:

“Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god,” wrote the German poet and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist in 1810. Watching the dance of a beautiful marionette, which has no sense of self, we begin to ponder our own self-awareness — the very essence of humanity. West seeks a similar effect on “808s and Heartbreak,” a heavy trip indeed.

Unlike many of the commenters chiming in on that site, I think this review is pretty damn good. Kanye seems to be getting a lot of respect from reviewers, which is interesting–much of his music up til now has seemed calculated and shallow (not generally good qualities with respect to critical acclaim), but I have always thought it exhibited a self-awareness that belied its superficiality. He’s been successful in the mainstream because he’s a great producer and an adequate rapper–he can put together an incredibly catchy hook as well as anybody out there–but he’s always been more than an adept musician. For a while, it seemed like he was very good at catching trends early and riding the wave–see his embrace of 80s kitsch right before, e.g., Grand Theft Auto: Vice City came out, and his use of futuristic imagery and sound on his last album. But it seems to me now that he has actually done quite a bit to set these trends (or at least to identify them so early that they aren’t even really trends yet, and use his celebrity to push them into the mainstream). And whether that’s true or not, it’s obvious that he believes it to be so. He thinks he’s more than a pop star. I’m starting to agree with him.

Anyway, here is what I think about the album:

808s & Heartbreak, much like Outkast’s Speakerboxxx / The Love Below, is shamelessly self-indulgent and weird. That pisses off a lot of people, especially those who thought they had Kanye figured out and see this as a pathetic, inauthentic shift in persona. But you know, I admire it, whether it’s successful or not–it would have been incredibly easy for Kanye to half-heartedly make another hip-hop album 2/3 as good as his last two. He would have made plenty of money, and nobody would have been any more critical than to say “he’s lost a step.” But he went ahead and got even weirder than he already was¹–pretty much completely abandoning rapping and most of the other touchstones of hip-hop and really embracing his stranger obsessions.

I’m reminded of Radiohead’s not-so-abrupt transition from standard (though excellent!) rock band to electronic experimentalists (Paranoid Android started it, Kid A and Amnesiac cemented it). They embraced some really weird stuff musically, and by sheer force of their popularity dragged a whole lot of people along with them. How many people were confronted with avant-garde push-the-envelope music because Radiohead basically made them listen to it? It seems to me that Kanye is trying to do the same thing here, except that there’s not really any blueprint for getting from rap to whatever 808s & Heartbreak is–at least not one that doesn’t end up making the artist look like an idiot. Still, for the most part I think it’s very successful.

Okay, so I’ll say a little bit about the actual songs on the album, rather than speak in generalities for the entire post. “Love Lockdown” is old news at this point, but it’s a pretty incredible piece of music, almost as weird and catchy as “Hey Ya!” (which I’d say is to the ’00s so far what “Beat It” was to the ’80s–the best song of the decade). “Heartless“, the second single, is pretty good–great hook, a bit of actual rapping from Mr. West–but as a “that woman is such a bitch” song, I’ve got to say, it’s sorta well-trod and not particularly interesting territory. “See You in My Nightmares” features the best rapper alive, Lil Wayne, so I automatically love it. But more objectively, it’s pretty silly, and Lil Wayne is not the best auto-tune user in the entire world (and he might be a little obsessed with the scatological). No matter, I still like it. “RoboCop” is pretty much an embarrassment and I wish I had a time machine to go back and convince Paul Verhoeven not to make the movie just so Kanye would have no inspiration for this annoying waste of time.² “Coldest Winter” is a pretty good song that ends with some seriously primal percussion. The album closer, “Pinocchio Story”, is pretty listenable. But more importantly, I agree with Ann Powers that it basically lays out the central conceit of the album–the struggle Kanye has to maintain his humanity (and his actual individuality) amidst the all-encompassing demands of his celebrity.

As a musical work, I think it’s very much up for discussion whether 808s & Heartbreak is a success. But as a meaningful cultural artifact, I think the simple fact that it can engender this kind of conversation demonstrates that Kanye has really accomplished something here.

(Recommended.)

¹ Kanye is exemplary of a general trend in hip-hop–these guys are getting a lot more willing to experiment with their work. While I have no doubt that has always been true of fringe, or even semi-popular, hip-hop, it wasn’t until Timbaland, Kanye, Eminem, and Outkast (among others) that truly popular hip-hop expanded, both musically and thematically. It’s a Good Thing.

² Which would be a big sacrifice, because RoboCop is a pretty awesome movie.