#PINOCCHIO STORY LYRICS KANYE WEST SOFTWARE#
For him, using Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction software with the robotic vocal effect, is a true crutch. Now he's an underdog once more, a rapper who wants to sing.īut at the moment, West can't sing, and it is that weakness for which this album will ultimately be remembered, some solid songs notwithstanding. Now they are the official record, uncertain melodies, banal lyrics and all.įor years West fought the notion that he was a producer trying to rap. In an earlier era these would have been demo tapes, left in a vault to await exhumation for an anniversary edition. On "Paranoid," you can actually hear laughing in the background, though whether it's at or with West, it's tough to say. Two songs, "Say You Will" and "Bad News," stretch out with instrumental breakdowns long past their obvious conclusion point, as if West forgot he left his sequencer on. But they feel nominal up against much of this album, which has the immediacy, looseness and rambling quality of a venting session recorded into a Webcam and posted on YouTube. (One time, on his blog, - West both blogs and Twitters - he drew attention to the "newer artwork with perfected type 4 all design snobs.") His self-control has faltered too: He has been arrested twice in recent months for tangles with the paparazzi, though charges were not filed in either incident.įor West, who has always intensely policed his own image, these are shocking ruptures. Then various versions, with incremental tweaks, were leaked online. West gave the premiere of the first single, "Love Lockdown," at the MTV Video Music Awards in September. "I know of some things that you ain't told me," he says on "Heartless." "I did some things, but that's the old me."Īnd it's not just the songs that are unmediated much about this album's release suggested a lack of filters. "Let me ask you how long have you known dude," he raps on "Bad News." "You played it off and act like he's brand-new/When did you decide to break the rules?" And the mistrust goes both ways. Every song on the album is rife with anguish, and his lyrics, about the shards of broken relationships, though often tediously written, can carry a fresh sting. But West uses electro (the title's "808" refers to the Roland TR-808 drum machine) for its sparseness, so that he might emote unchallenged.įlaunting pain requires a sort of arrogance, too, so it's little surprise that West takes to it so naturally. Their synth-driven electro had blasts of funk momentum. And in places, especially on the breezy, slick "Paranoid," this music is redolent of the chilly, slightly irregular R&B the producers the Neptunes were making four or five years ago, for Kelis, Omarion and others. West has cited the electro-pop pioneer Gary Numan and TJ Swan, who sang exuberant, nasal hooks on many a 1980s Queens rap track, as vocal reference points for this album, though in truth hearing West try to sing these songs is far weirder. "Amazing," a visceral collaboration with Young Jeezy, sounds as if it were recorded inside a whirring old grandfather clock, a collection of precisely moving parts neatly interlocking - classic Kanye. On both "Love Lockdown" and "Coldest Winter," thunderous drums cut through an electro haze, and "Bad News" features one of the most efficient bass lines West has ever constructed. Some of the results suggest his old, oversize sound. By any measure, these are seismic changes, yet he persisted with recording. In April West split from his fiancee, Alexis Phifer. His mother, Donda West, died last November following complications from plastic surgery. West would have been forgiven for taking a break after releasing "Graduation," his third album, last year. After all, what is Kanye West without scale?
At worst, it's clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose. At best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. "808s & Heartbreak" sounds like none of his other albums, nor any rap album of note - "minimal but functional" is how he has described it to MTV. And so, as he's dismantling his storytelling structures, he's also making his productions skeletal, and largely trading bombastic rapping for vulnerable singing. On any of West's earlier albums, he would have quickly undermined this sentiment - of course a shopping spree would cheer him up - but here, bluntness is the goal.