The Case Against 808s and Heartbreak
Ok, here we are. I’ve been hinting all week that I think 808s and Heartbreak is not very good. That’s a bit of an oversimplification: I just think that 808s and Heartbreak combines the worst parts of my two favorite Kanye albums, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Graduation. It has the former’s shitty sound, and an under-cooked version of its theme; it has the latter’s space age sound, just all simultaneously damp and hot. 808s and Heartbreak is a big mess of an album.
It is an intrinsically transitional album. That’s not a terrible thing, necessarily! I think every album, except for his first and his last, are transitional. The three albums in the middle of his work all flow very logically forward to solidify grandly into the masterpiece that is, well, you get it.
I think a big part of my antipathy for 808s and Heartbreak is that it’s taken by many to be such a singular achievement within West’s canon. It is not. Some people like it for its emotional heft. That’s a fine reason to like something, but it’s not a great reason to think it’s a great work of art. And sort of meta-critically, it seems like 808s and Heartbreak codes as ‘white’. (Did’ya see that Factory Records allusion on the cover?) That is a laughably misguided way to take the album. I’m going to elaborate on some reasons why people like and don’t like the album, and then I’ll tell you why I sort of dislike it.
So here’s the big case against 808s and Heartbreak. I think, in the course of listening and writing, I ended up thinking the album’s not that bad. (It’s what you’d call ‘a priori flawed’, but who/what isn’t?) If I were pressed, I might say that Late Registration is worse, but I’d just rather not listen to 808s and Heartbreak very much at all.
