On both “Love Lockdown” and “Coldest Winter,” thunderous drums cut through an electro haze, and “Bad News” features one of the most efficient bass lines Mr. Some of the results suggest his old, oversize sound. By any measure, these are seismic changes, yet he persisted with recording.
West split from his fiancée, Alexis Phifer. His mother, Donda West, died last November following complications from plastic surgery. West would have been forgiven for taking a break after releasing “Graduation,” his third album, last year. After all, what is Kanye West without scale? At worst, it’s clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose.
At best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. “808s & Heartbreak” sounds like none of his other albums, nor any rap album of note “minimal but functional” is how he has described it to MTV. And so, as he’s dismantling his storytelling structures, he’s also making his productions skeletal, and largely trading bombastic rapping for vulnerable singing. West’s earlier albums, he would have quickly undermined this sentiment of course a shopping spree would cheer him up but here, bluntness is the goal. On “Pinocchio Story” he continues his lament: The product of a tumultuous year in his personal life, it operates solely on the level of catharsis no commentary, no self-consciousness, no concern for anything but feeling. West is done letting himself off the hook. On “808s & Heartbreak,” which was released by Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam on Monday, Mr. On “Breathe In, Breathe Out,” from his 2004 debut album, “The College Dropout,” he distilled the essential struggle that has defined his career into one sharp joke: “Always said if I rapped, I’d say something significant/But now I’m rapping about money, ho’s and rims again.” He rarely aims his daggers at others there’s plenty in the mirror to clown on. On previous albums he’s hilariously taken himself to task for his foibles of style and narcissism. But he is also funny, something, given his profound sense of entitlement, he very rarely gets credit for. West is mouthy, impertinent, flamboyant, bellicose, provocative, greedy and needy. “Do you really have the stamina,” Kanye West wonders to himself on “Pinocchio Story (Freestyle Live From Singapore),” the bizarre rap-star-in-need-of-a-Geppetto hidden track from his fourth album, “808s & Heartbreak,” “for everybody that sees you crying/And says, ‘You oughta laugh! You oughta laugh!’ ?”
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