Public Service Announcement: Kanye's New Album is a Heartache
Friday, November 21st, 2008
Kanye West took a three week vacation to Hawaii and belched this album while he was there. Now he wants you and everyone else to go and spend their money on this monumental failure entitled 808s & Heartbreak. I was a huge fan of The College Dropout (and liked Late Registration and Graduation). You may think that the departure from the Education-themed titles is the source of this album’s troubles – - a valid point – - but the dagger in the heart of this album is AUTO-TUNE. Auto-Tune is a program that “uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to disguise inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed many artists to produce more precisely tuned recordings.” In other words, it give the ability of people who can’t sing the ability to not sound like shit. While this program has been relegated to aging artists such as Cher (remember that crap song “Believe”?) and Madonna (basically any of her new stuff), Kanye felt the need to go nuts with the program for the entire album. In an interview Kanye is quoted saying that Auto-Tune “is the funnest thing to use.” For the same reason wild children are given markers that can’t write on walls, someone needs to delete this program from Kanye’s computer permanentaly.
So let me get this straight. You can wire his entire jaw shut and he will still put out an amazing album, but after he shows the world he is more than a producer and has some real talent rapping, he decides to go and become some weird T-Pain/Britney Spears vocalist. That just isn’t right. There is not a single song on this album that I can direct you to for even a glimmer of optimism (unless you count the fact that it is only 12 songs long). Like salt in a wound, Kanye’s final song on the album is a live freestyle titled “Pinocchio Story” (recorded in Singapore). Creatively the song includes the following lyrics:
I just want to be a real boy,
Pinocchio story goes, I just want to be a real boy
Pinocchio story goes
The album is set to be released this coming Tuesday, November 21, 2008. As a service to yourself and music in general, leave this one on the shelf.
For a cool mash-up, press play on both of the videos below and turn Cher’s down a little under half way…
Kanye West- Love Lockdown
Cher- Believe
