oneweekoneband:

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.

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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.

oneweekoneband:

That final point is one of the most important parts of Kanye’s actual work. He has some heavy auteur signifiers, certainly, but he’s also skilled at working with people. He went from locking himself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers to working in an historic studio with Jon Brion. It was a fruitful — and fitful — collaboration. On the one hand, Brion was like a candyman to Kanye:

I introduced him to the Celeste and it blew his mind, and then to the Chamberlin. I said, “Here is the original sampler, invented in 1946, and there’s a tape player under every key, with recordings on this one of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra recorded in the late ’50s.” I put my hand on the keys and you could see fire shooting out of his eyes, he was so excited. So here we are with the instrument collection, and we are following my obsession of making new sounds appear in a very organic way.

But Kanye clearly didn’t defer. There are Jon Brion-y parts to the album, but it seems like Kanye used Brion’s production almost like another instrument or just one piece, a wall, in his songs’ build. MTV recounts the origin of “Roses”: all the froufrou and bombast of the chorus was, in Brion’s mind, going to be the whole song; Kanye stripped most of it away.

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Daily vanity reblog here. This essay ended up, I think, a little half baked. I thought there’d be a religious theme for today, and the piece was going to be about sophomore albums, but then it came to be about Kanye’s collaboration and how it’s weird that he’s so good at bending his will, and how that’s an almost religious form of self-negation that’s really admirable and puts him on another level. I didn’t really get to making that point as strongly as I wanted to, though.

There was an unexpected offshoot: thinking about Late Registration and Jon Brion got me to really appreciating Aimee Mann a lot more. Did you know that two of her albums were released as Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs versions? Her music sounds great.