Album Review: Kanye West – 808s and Heartbreaks

(or “All You Need Is Autotune“)

It seems like most artists who are not well-liked and widely considered to be assholes usually sit pretty solidly on the US charts while bitching about not winning Grammys and getting attacked at concerts and the like. It could be, however that one such artist, the by-now-quite-infamous Kanye “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” West may have forfeit his chances of ever being behind the mic at the Grammys for any reason other than bitching about his loss.

Kanye West keeps with the "heart" motif for most of the album. Can we say "trying too hard"?

His latest album, the bewilderingly titled “808s and Heartbreaks,” in addition to probably having already been done by Akon is absolutely swimming, nay, DROWNING in autotune. I highly suspect that Kanye didn’t sing anything on his album at all but instead just rapped or spoke his poems into a mic and the songs were written for him by some John Doe ghost producer.

It seems as though Akon Kanye has abandoned the image of outspoken, progressive man who’s “keepin’ it real” in favor of a pussified, emo and very very R&B image. His tracks are, aside from the all-too-common soft and painfully slow paced intro, still rather Kanye at their core and some of them are almost worthy of a head bob or two…that is until you realize that most of the danceable tracks are ruined by annoying combinations of grating sampled sounds, annoying keyboard blips and beeps, whiny keyboard string textures, overproduced “Linkin Park” sounds, and disgusting vomit-inducing amounts of autotune. Seriously. Every word of every track except one (maybe two) is autotuned. That is not an exaggeration.

There isn’t really much more to be said. If you like autotune and badly executed R&B attempts almost every one of which is ruined by one annoying repetitive sound or another, this is most certainly the album for you. You can even go out and actually purchase a copy if you really want to waste time, gasoline, and money on a man who has said more notoriously stuck-up, stupid things than Jessica Simpson and Rod Blagojevich put together and fancies himself the second coming of god’s gift to music. Or if you want to deal with iTunes’ horrible, evil copy protection.