When I get around to the letter “K” on my best albums of the decade run down your gonna find all of Kanye West albums. There is a reason why I don’t care about his antics and the reason is he is absolutely correct when he thinks any one who doesn’t submit to his songwriting prowess is an idiot or lying or both. In this sense he is really the Tiger Woods -if not the MJ, of rap, a conflicted genius hiding in plain signt.
And I forgive him everything, I sure forgive him for hurting Taylor Swift, because he is what he is and what he is is, with the possible exceptions of Taylor Swift and Conor Oberst (both of whom made my top ten albums of the decade), the best writer of the 2000s. From “Jesus Walks” (hell, since his stuff on The Blueprint) through “Robocop” he has written one artistically valid hit single after another. If Kanye West were to die today he would be remembered with the same reverance we hold Kurt Cobain, maybe even Biggie.
Nobody else seems to think 808s and Heartbreak was such a big deal -compared to say College Dropout, it hurtles between between recrimination, mourning and isolation. In the dead of winter. “You’re joking.” He tells a girl. “That’s a good one. You’re first good one in awhile”. “Do you think I sacrificed real life for all the fame of flashing lights?” West freestyles in concert for an adoring japanese audience on “Pinnochio” . On the huge hit single “Love Lockdown” Kanye sings: “I’m not lovin you, the way I wanted to. I bet no one knew, I got no one new.” This is the mock loss of a puppy dog rejected, this is a man completely baffled as to how to solve his problems. Joined by Lil Wayne, another man with problems Jay-Z don’t have, or West can do is reject love: “LETTING YOU KNOW. Tell everybody that you know That I don’t love you no more And that’s one thing THAT YOU KNOW”.
We all love those things we find most reveling about ourselves and so sure I love 808s And Heartbreak for the same reasons and in the same ways as two of my other fave albums of all times: Here My Dear and Imperial Bedroom. All three albums stick to you like cheap perfume, all three of em are extended studies at the heart of emotional distilled spirits of the time and all three had both the songs and the music to back em up. Not one of these three songs has anything close to mediocre song and not one of them has anything less than the cutting edge of production. Gaye invented disco for adults, Costello dropped Nick Lowe for Beatles producer Geoff Emerick and highly stylized new wave and Kanye West brought the world emo hope and a sound so disquiet and so spirited and so neurotic and so melodic it reminds me of Tchaikovsky; the synths and the beats are alienated, depressed, alone. There is no uplift here.
But it is why people like me love pop music so much. It can express the unexpressable -a dark winter’s masterpiece and the rebirth of hip hop as a sound, like rock, and like classical, able to say anything the heart can feel up to and including its beats and its breaks