Just as hard as it to pinpoint what facet of a great Kanye West song makes it great (is it the thunderous live percussion, the triumphant Curtis Mayfield sample or Lupe Fiasco’s killer verse that makes “Touch the Sky?”), it is incredibly difficult to decide which ingredient of 808s spoils the soup. 808s, despite its myriad flaws, is both a reflection of the hard times West has suffered through and a testament to his artistic fortitude. But instead of a faux retirement or a retreat into the business side of things, which may have been reasonable responses for any number of pop stars but certainly not for West, we get another album. With his mother’s death a year ago and the sundering of his engagement to longtime girlfriend Alexis Phifer earlier this year, West’s post- Graduation life has been anything but halcyon add to the personal adversities the stress of headlining the most ambitious hip-hop concert tour ever attempted, and you have a recipe for a major breakdown. Applaud West for winning Grammy’s Rap Album of the Year award three times, and he’ll only point out that he’s been unfairly shut out for the big prize, overall album of the year, on as many occasions.Īnd so this famously unsatisfied, irrepressible and often insufferable temperament, fresh off a trilogy of albums likely to be remembered as some of the most innovative and endearing in the history of hip-hop, has produced 2008’s biggest musical conundrum, the hurried and ill-conceived Auto-Tune experiment 808s & Heartbreak. In West’s world, each success is overshadowed by a disappointment imagined larger than it actually is, and every artistic breakthrough is only a stepping stone to something even more coherent, polished and universal. From the very beginning he has shown an utter disdain for running victory laps or patting himself on the back.
If such an instant of self-congratulation has existed for West, though, we’ll probably never know about it. Date it early (the out-of-nowhere ubiquity of The College Dropout) or late ( Graduation’s dominance of 50 Cent’s Curtis during the first-week sales showdown of last fall) at some point West has to have rested on his Luis Vuitton-labeled laurels for at least a millisecond and savored the fact that his singular styles of production and emceeing, not to mention dressing, have left irreplaceable impressions on hip-hop as well as the culture at large.
There must have been a moment when Kanye West was actually content with being the most potent and essential personality in hip-hop.
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