My Favorite Kanye West Album Turned 10 This Week

The first time I heard 808s & Heartbreak was months before it was released. Every couple days, a new version of a song from the upcoming album would leak, until at some point, music pirates could sort of piece together the album it would become, assembling low quality, sometimes incomplete files.

The track RoboCop, in particular, was much more raw. It didn’t have all the strings flourishes which were probably done later in the process. Frankly, I preferred the leaked version.

But overall, it was certain to be a departure from “Crossover Kanye”, the guy who wanted to be everything for everybody, the guy who was rapping over wholesome beats reimagining classics by the likes of Ray Charles and Curtis Mayfield. 

To understand how I felt at the time when hearing Love Lockdown and Heartless for the first time, you have to remember that it was a time before all the autotune crooners really made it to the top and saturated the waves with minimal and (sometimes) forward-thinking R&B songs.

Drake’s breakthrough mixtape, So Far Gone, was still a year away.

In hindsight, 808s feels like a blueprint for a genre that has had more than one corporate facelift, and that has been formatted to death. More than a mission statement, it offers a parallel vision of what might have been.

At the time, hip hop was producing some great records, but as a whole, the art form was experiencing growing pains. Stuck in a post-90s haze, a lot of rap was cheesy. Even Lil Wayne’s magnum opus and most profitable album of the year, Tha Carter III, appears scattered ten years later. In comparison, 808s & Heartbreak offered a heart-on-it’s-sleeve honesty that was hard to digest for the hip hop community, but was more authentic than pretty anything else on the market.

It’s use of autotune is certainly what stood out at the time. Every one used it, but they had the decency to hide it as much as possible. Instead, Kanye took the T-Pain gimmick and used it with artistry, to express a side of him that we hadn’t really seen at that point.

The use of autotune was also probably a necessity in the process of producing songs in which West would actually have to sing. Kanye's live performances from that era are something to consider.

As a singer that has had his share of vocal dilemmas, I can honestly say that it’s physically painful to hear, but his performances also feel actually courageous. Kanye was wrong to think he could sing, but it would have been really easy for him to do what everyone is doing today, i.e. letting pre-recorded vocals play and punching in when he feels like it. He still went ahead and attempted to do something that was doomed to fail, which is commendable.

With every false note, Kanye reminded us that great artist miss 100% of shots they don’t take.

There are more uplifting Kanye albums. There are harder Kanye records. There are more impressive Kanye albums… But, to this day, 808s & Heartbreak remains my favorite of his. With all its flaws and its idiosyncrasies, for me, its his most successful album.

It’s the one I connect to the most emotionally.