There is the incredibly cheesy "Robocop" as well as "See You in My Nightmares" where Kanye and Lil Wayne have an awful singing competition. That being said, for every great song, this also has some of Kanye's worst to this day. "Love Lockdown" still has one of Ye's catchiest choruses in my opinion and I love the dance beats and soulful backing vocals of "Paranoid".
There are very melodic tracks like "Welcome to Heartbreak" and "Heartless" which both have some of the strongest breakup narratives here and the former has a great Kid Cudi feature, who should be thanked just as much as Kanye for the influence of 808s with his melody writing all throughout the album. There are beautifully depressing pop rap songs like "Coldest Winter" and "Street Lights" and an extremely consistent first half with easily some of the best electropop of all time. I would even say that this is the most influential hip-hop album of the 2010s period, because I don't know where Drake's music would be without this, or a whole league of emo rappers without the 808s and autotune from this album.Įven if the sound of 808s & Heartbreak would prove to have inspired nobody, and just ended up being a mere footnote in hip-hop history, the amazing song quality is still here. So how is this record so widely respected nowadays? I would assume it's because the album's shock value was short lived, due to how influential this proved to be on 2010s pop rap.
This stylistic change was not met with warm reception and left critics and many fans confused at the time.
Writing another addition to his college saga, with what was supposed to be Good Ass Job did not seem appropriate at the time, so Ye completely switched sounds, instead making heartbroken electropop and pop rap on 808s & Heartbreak. Everything changed though after losing the 2 most important women in his life, with the passing of his mother and the breakup with his then-girlfriend. Ye had a fantastic 3 album run right off the bat of his career, with The College Dropout and Late Registration being some of the best music in hip-hop period.
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