• 808s & Heartbreaks – Hypothesis: Kanye West took the Biggest Risk of his Career on 808s & Heartbreak. Kanye’s performance of “Love Lockdown” at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards gave birth to an artistic evolution that, in the nearly 10 years since, has single-handedly changed the sonic course of rap more than any other.
• Kanye West arrived at Auckland’s Westin Hotel in December 2008 looking exhausted, at the end of every possible rope. He was in New Zealand to promote—or perhaps explain—808s & Heartbreak.

1. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Pics
2. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreaks Cover
3. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Full Album
4. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Tpb
5. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Hollywood Bowl
6. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Full Album
7. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Torrent

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.

Kanye West returns with his fourth album 808s & Heartbreak. His highly anticipated 2008 album features the heart pounding first single, 'Love Lockdown' which premiered live for the first time on the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards.

The album was formed off the back of an extremely difficult time for West; his mother died due to complications after cosmetic surgery, his relationship with on-and-off again girlfriend/fiancé Alexis Phifer finally ended for good, and Kanye was struggling to adapt to his celebrity status, often being criticized from the media. Emotionally drained and feeling somewhat lost, Kanye dealt with his pain by channeling it into a sonically stripped-down album, one dominated by his use of the titular Roland TR-808 drum machine and Auto-Tune. Kanye said:

It was just what was in my heart. The type of ideas that it was coming up with, the melodies that were in me — what was in me I couldn’t stop.

The album is heavily influenced by 1980s synthpop and electropop. Kanye used the “808” sound and altered its pitch to create the unique distorted and electronic sound you hear throughout the album. He called this effect the “heartbreak,” and said that it was ‘representative of his state of mind’.

Kanye had previously used auto-tune, for example on his 2004 hit “Jesus Walks”, but it was never a focal point of the music. Kanye was taught how to use auto-tune by T-Pain.

Kanye also credited up and coming rapper Kid Cudi who had recently signed with his label, G.O.O.D. Music. He became a fan after receiving a copy of his 2008 mixtape A Kid Named Cudi. Kanye flew Cudi out to Hawaii to work on the album. He was eventually featured on the album’s second track, “Welcome To Heartbreak.”

On September 18th, 2008, Kanye released the album’s lead single, “Love Lockdown.”

Kanye first announced the album’s release date on September 24th, 2008, saying:

I changed my album to November something cause I finished the album and I felt like it..I want y'all to hear it as soon as possible.

On October 16th, 2008, Kanye teased a portion of “Coldest Winter.”

On November 4th, 2008, he released the album’s second single, “Heartless.”

The album had a major influence on modern hip-hop music, having influenced most notably Drake, Frank Ocean and Travis Scott.

Though the 1939 film adaptation is better known, in the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz we learn that the Tin Man character was once a human lumberjack. The Wicked Witch of the West put a spell on his axe to keep him from marrying his true love. The axe cut off his limbs, forced him to trade in flesh and blood for cold, hard, metal, and eventually caused him to lose his heart.

Similarly, at a 2008 press conference to promote his then-new album 808s & Heartbreak, Kanye West described the inspiration for the album as “suffering multitude losses at the same time—it’s like losing an arm and a leg and having to find a way to keep walking through it.” In the months leading up to 808s, Kanye experienced the dissolution of a six-year relationship with his then fiancée Alexis Phifer and, most tragic of all, the death of his mother Donda West following a cosmetic surgery procedure.

Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Pics

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. While he would later find love again in his wife Kim Kardashian, his mother’s death marked the loss of his heart.

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. While on his meandering search for a new heart, he began to carry a different kind of baggage, even managing to find his own personal Wizard of Oz in Donald Trump years later—a feckless imposter with nothing to offer but bluster and theatrics.

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. In a 2013 interview with the New York Times, Kanye claimed the album was “super-polarizing and redefined the sound of radio.”

Both wildly popular and misunderstood in the moment, 808s inspired a legion of artists that grew up in its wake. The album’s immediate impact was felt the very next year as Drake and Kid Cudi cemented their status as newfound rap stars.

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.

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. It’s no wonder, Juice cites 808s as his favorite album of all time.

To talk about 808s & Heartbreak, you have to first talk about the aforementioned TR-808. Released in 1980, the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer was one of the first programmable drum machines, allowing users to create their own drum patterns as opposed to using presets. 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.

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.

The relatively low price and faulty transistors contributed to the machine’s unique sound. 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. But all of those quirks helped bring about the 808’s future ubiquity in hip-hop music.

However, in the early 1980s, the 808 was a commercial failure. Many serious musicians didn’t respect the machine because of its artificial sounds, and the aforementioned transistors made an already unpopular machine impossible to produce after advances in semiconductor technology. Roland stopped making them in 1983.

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.

In addition to the TR-808, the vocal plug-in Auto-Tune played a huge role in the album’s innovative sound. 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.

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. (Death Of Autotune).” Even though Jay was ultimately unsuccessful, there remained as a sizable contingent of traditionalists growing fed up with how many artists were using Auto-Tune as a crutch, not a tool.

To Jay’s point, the late 2000s were littered with bad Auto-Tune. 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.

Kanye West 808s And Heartbreaks Cover

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. Both Common’s Electric Circus and Yasiin Bey’s The New Danger were were met with mixed reviews and commercial indifference. According to Kanye, some people even advised him to do the album under a different name.

It’s easy to see what his advisors were trying to protect. In the previous year, West had just reached his commercial pinnacle. 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. 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.

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. In addition to T-Pain’s help with vocals, Kanye worked with multiple writers on each song. 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.

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. West pared down the bombastic maximalism of Graduation to, at times, the most basic sounds imaginable. 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 808s And Heartbreak Full Album

Graduation was the culmination of Kanye’s journey from underdog to juggernaut. 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. 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. On 808s, however Kanye is the one drowning, with lost loves stepping past his flailing hands leaving him to wallow in deep, suffocating sadness.

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.

Kanye has a reputation for being self-obsessed, but 808s & Heartbreak takes almost a step past it being endearing, when it comes to his discussion of relationships and love lost. The album is more navel diving then navel gazing. He’s mostly wallowing in his own sadness. All of the heartbreak on the album is someone else’s fault.

Maybe that’s why so many young artists connected with the album in their formative years. On “Lucid Dreams,” Chicago rapper Juice WRLD sings:

Those lines have a direct parallel to Kanye’s “Heartless,” where he sings:

Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Tpb

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. On Post’s very on the nose “Rich & Sad,” he similarly laments about how material objects can never bring him happiness:

Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Hollywood Bowl

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.

Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Full Album

Even when 808s & Heartbreak isn’t emotionally mature, it remains emotionally honest. The intense sense of dread that pervades throughout feels true to life. 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.

Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak Torrent

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. Similarly on 808s & Heartbreak, at his numbest, most depressed, moment, Kanye was able draw out real emotion from that drum machine, an Auto-Tune filter, and his own life to create a blueprint artists continue to follow to this day.

In the film version of The Wizard of Oz, the Wizard eventually tells the Tin Man’s wish for a new heart by saying “You want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. 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. Kanye’s personal loss was the music world’s gain, but here’s hoping that one day he will be made whole again.