#808s and heartbreak listen series#

His fourth studio album, 808s & Heartbreak, is the best musical and lyrical manifestation of Kanye’s need to say everything all at once. His problem - especially outside of the recording booth - has always been the opposite: Kanye has always struggled to withhold (or at least to measure) his confessions. He’s not like Nas, who often sounds shy and characterless in interviews despite being a hell of a storyteller in his rhymes, and he’s not like Eminem, who always depended on his alter ego to share his darkest thoughts. The break beat is, and always has been, a haven for hyper-masculine confessionals that might otherwise go unspoken.īut Kanye West, long as the public has known him, has never needed the break beat to say what he wants to say.

recorded a song for his suicide at age 24, or that Jay-Z wrote an entire hit song about not crying, and that each of them felt comfortable doing so on 16 bars. There’s a reason, for example, that Scarface once wrote a song in the form of a diary entry, or that The Notorious B.I.G. That’s been a component of the story for a long time - recall Sugar Hill Gang’s proud pronouncement, in 1979, that “I got a color TV, so I can see/the Knicks play basketball” - but hip hop verses are also a place for confessions, specifically for those of black men.

#808s and heartbreak listen series#

Hip hop’s lyrical narrative often gets unfairly abbreviated to being about nothing more than posturing and persona, a never-ending series of mostly meaningless boasts about how nice my rhymes sound, and so on. Part of a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense.