Up ‘til now, West’s sonic palette has been proudly limitless, drawing a little bit of everything across genres and borders, but for 808s, he’s chosen to limit himself to beats crafted with the classic Roland TR-808, vintage (or at least vintage- sounding) synths, and Auto-Tuned singing.
Where West’s previous efforts have been rap albums that incorporated a lot of pop elements, 808s & Heartbreak is a pop album that happens to feature a little rapping. Had he chosen to go that route, West surely has enough clout to change that – to produce the hip-hop version of Blood on the Tracks, if you will – but he decided to go another direction completely. In pretty much any other genre, these events would be grist for at least one album of probing, confessional material, but Kanye West is a rapper, and mainstream hip-hop has never made much room for that sort of thing. Here’s the back story: West has, in the last year, lost his mother to unexpected complications resulting from cosmetic surgery, as well as suffered the (apparently ugly) demise of an engagement. The thing is, as brave an album as this is, it isn’t a great one, or even a particularly good one, on its own strictly musical merits. As it is, 808s will raise a few eyebrows, roll a few eyes, shift some units, and recede into distant memory by next year. If this record had come out 20 years ago, it would be a phenomenon, if for no other reason than that people wouldn’t be able to stop talking about it.
Which is where Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak comes in: you see, West isn’t a superstar, but he believes he is, and that’s part of what gave him big enough balls to record this album – one of the oddest, bravest releases from a top-selling major-label artist in recent memory.
These days, the difference between a major hit, a minor success, and a flop is razor-thin when even a huge debut like Taylor Swift’s Fearless can bring in fewer than 500,000 units and still take the title for biggest first-week sales for a country album in 2008, it’s clearer than ever that we’ve traded superstars for a succession of transient celebrities who lack the power to hold our collective attention long enough to truly entertain us. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the most obvious reference point for this phenomenon, but it used to happen once or twice a year it was part of the magic of the communal culture, where popular art transcended barriers of race, sex, and age simply because everyone was selecting their entertainment from the same relatively small menu. It seems like forever ago, but in the not-too-distant past – before Clear Channel and focus groups destroyed Top 40 radio, before cable television fragmented our viewing patterns, before file-sharing brought the music industry to its knees, and before the rise of 24-hour paparazzi "news" destroyed celebrity mystique – it was possible for pop stars to do things that genuinely captivated and shocked us.
0 kommentar(er)
