808s and heartbreak autotune
It wasn’t until the last five years where autotune started to become more accepted as the experimental tool it is in hip-hop, with acts like Travis Scott, Future, Young Thug and a slew of others taking the technique to new heights. T-Pain was plagued with the “can’t sing” critique right up until his infamous NPR Tiny Desk performance 3 years ago, 808s & Heartbreak marked the first time in Kanye’s career the public had questioned his artistic vision, and Jay-Z tried to kill the trend of autotune all together with his Blueprint III single “D.O.A (Death of Autotune)”. Rap and R&B over the last decade are where autotune has existed in its most ambitious of ways, yet is often also where its use has been criticized the most. However, the genre where autotune is most prevalent is the genre that denounces it the most, hip-hop. Autotune is a fundamental part of music the same way beat production is its purpose is to play a role in the bigger picture that is the quality of the song. Pop legend Cher has been deemed ‘queen of autotune’ by the New York Post, Daft Punk’s “Around The World” was listed at 172 on Blender’s 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born list and artists like Peter Frampton were being praised for their use of autotune in the 70s/80s, to the point where his live album Frampton Comes Alive sold over 11 million copies. A slight pitch correction could have done the trick.Autotune has played a part in music for centuries now and has received acclaim for its use as a vocal enhancer. This noble failure of an album might easily have been a noble success if he had tweaked the Fun-o-Meter just a bit. Kanye the Songbird has forgotten the lesson that Kanye the Rapper taught his listeners: Heartbreak is not incompatible with wit, or with sharply drawn details, or with a buoyant beat. But in his most touching songs - “Through the Wire,” “Family Business,” “Hey Mama” - he tucked his confessions in between boasts and jokes. there is no Louis Vuitton I could put on. “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs.” The low point is the freestyle “Pinocchio Story,” recorded live in Singapore, which finds Kanye bellowing, “There is no Gucci I could buy. Many of his best songs have focused on his ambivalence about materialism, but on 808s & Heartbreak, the theme has hardened into schtick. Like many sad sacks, Kanye likes the sound of his own whimper, and mistakes sentiments such as “I could never seem to find what real love was about” for profundities. In “Bad News,” Kanye’s digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he’s become less than human. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn’t just sharpen flat notes: It’s a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness, and upping the pathos.
Kanye can’t really sing in the classic sense, but he’s not trying to. But here, the drear never lifts, and he never stops wallowing.Ĭ'mon Guys, Kanye West Isn't Selling Clothes Out of Garbage Bags - They're Obviously Construction Bags How could you be so heartless?” he sings in “Heartless.” Kanye has often chosen introspection and self-exposure to the usual gangsta posturing. “The coldest story ever told/Somewhere far along this road he lost his soul. But aside from one bleak song written for his mom (“Coldest Winter”), 808s & Heartbreak is a breakup album - it’s Kanye’s would-be Here, My Dear or Blood on the Tracks, a mournful song-suite that swings violently between self-pity and self-loathing. The record arrives in the wake of a year in which Kanye lost his mother and split with his fiancée, designer Alexis Phifer. A bold, fascinating, foolhardy, occasionally unlistenable Kanye West record was inevitable, with or without the cyborg-soul software. But Auto-Tune isn’t totally to blame for 808s & Heartbreak. With Kanye largely abandoning rapping in favor of digitally altered crooning, his fourth album represents a cultural high-water mark for Auto-Tune, that now ubiquitous pitch-correction technology. Kanye West announced long ago that mere hip-hop superstardom was not enough for him - he wanted to be “the number one artist in the world.” So it’s no surprise that his untrammeled egotism has led him well beyond the usual limits of his genre.