Don’t get it twisted – 808s & Heartbreak is NOT a hip hop album. It’s a VnB album (that stands for “vocoder and blues” for those of you keeping score at home).
Seriously, the first two tracks – Say You Will and Welcome to Heartbreak – are not even close to anything known as hip hop. Instead, Kayne sings RnB vocals drenched in vocoder and auto-tune.
The third track, Heartless, features some sort-of-rapping. But that sort-of-rapping sort of sucks, so it’s pretty irrelevant. Getting back to hardcore VnB on the fourth track, Amazing, Kanye sings some more while Young Jeezy stops by to stink up the place.
Next up is Love Lockdown, the first single off the disc. It’s a combo of Jesus Walks drums, poorly utilized Daft Punk vocal effects, and a song structure straight out of Tainted Love. Basically, it sounds like shit.
The following track, Paranoid, is a step in the right direction. The melody is strong and the song has a powerful forward movement. Kanye actually spits some rhymes here, but they’re nothing insightful or infectious. This song is by far the best thing on 808s and Heartbreak.
Props to Kanye for naming the seventh track RoboCop. Too bad the song blows. Next up is Street Lights, which sucks so let’s just breeze past that one. Actually, come to think of it, Bad News sounds like poop too so let’s keep it moving.
This takes us to track 10, See You in My Nightmares. Now that’s a nice way to sum up this album: I’ll probably have nightmares about it. Hell, even Lil Wanye can’t save this song.
Coldest Winter isn’t as awful as its predecessors, but I still didn’t enjoy it. At this point, I’m pretty sure that Kanye’s next project will be a duet album with Annie Lennox.
The “bonus track” is a horrid live freestyle called Pinocchio Story. It’s full of people screaming in the background. At first, you might think they’re screaming out of joy. But by the end of track, it’s 100% obvious that they’re screaming in pain. They’ve just been subjected to entire concert of this crap. I would be screaming too.
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