Week 3: Kanye West – 808s And Heartbreak
Bet you didn’t see this one coming, huh?
Three entries in and I’ve already spent quite a bit of time discussing what I see as the biggest problem in modern-day pop. That issue, as I’m sure you can guess, is the lack of emotional depth. Aside from the bubblegum instincts that have been an omnipresent threat to music since at least the 1960s ("Yummy Yummy Yummy" is worse than anything even Katy Perry has ever done, and that was released in ’68), music producers nowadays have access to two tools that allow them to minimize the human element in their songs to a level smaller than anything before. Those two tools are the genre of hip-hop and Auto-Tune.
First, let me assure you that I’m not calling hip-hop soulless. Far from it in fact; in terms of emotional honesty and accessibility, I see hip-hop as the strongest successor to blues music the modern era has. Like blues music, hip-hop was born in the streets, often (though not always) in areas of extreme poverty, such as The Bronx. Both genres are also extremely simple in terms of equipment; much like how the blues requires nothing more than a singer and an acoustic guitar (sometimes even less), all hip-hop needs is a rapper and a good beat, which is often taken from another song. Both genres can be approached by virtually anyone, while most others require much more in terms of equipment and/or virtuosity.
Unlike the blues, however, hip-hop, at least nowadays, has a strong emphasis on production. While the pinnacle of blues is often held to be the music of Robert Johnson, which sounds like it was recorded in a broom closet with a reel-to-reel player, hip-hop relishes technology, using the latest in synthesizers and drum machines to create something that almost, but not quite, sounds real. After all, electronics are far easier to control than real instruments. For a producer focused entirely on generating a certain sound or beat, keyboards and computers are much easier to use in teasing out the necessary sound.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you like any hip-hop made in the past 20 years not made by The Roots, chances are that most, if not all of the music used in the songs was either sampled or artificially generated. The problem in my mind is that this tendency to artificiality in hip-hop leads producers to go too far and turn to a method to perfect the few human elements in their songs: the hook and the rapper. This is the process that calls for Auto-Tune.
Auto-Tune represents the latest wave in the long musical history of acoustic manipulation. On the performer’s end, musicians have lept through hoops for decades trying to make their instruments sound unique or, failing that, like something else entirely. Both jazz trumpeters and rock guitarists altered their instruments to sound more like the human voice (using trumpet bells and wah-wah petals, respectively), and other guitarists worked at making their instrument sound as raw as possible by either partially destroying their equipment (Dave Davies on “You Really Got Me”) or recording it in unorthodox ways (John Lennon on “Revolution”).
On the producer’s end, Les Paul (yes, that Les Paul) And Mary Ford did some of the first vocal manipulations using overdubs, a technique that would later be perfected by Queen and their producers. The Beatles went farther by intentionally distorting John Lennon’s voice (due to his own personal hatred of his singing) to eerie effect. The first true vocal manipulations, however, were performed using a device called a vocoder, which was used to synthesize the human voice. Though it was used a few other times in the early 70s, the first real successes with the technology were Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and various recordings by The Alan Parsons Project. Before long, the distinctively inhuman sound of artificial human speech could be heard all through pop music (here are a few examples).
The main difference between the above techniques and Auto-Tune is that, in general use, Auto-Tune is used to subtly perfect a song, rather than alter it. Similar to overdubbing can graft several vocal takes together in order to generate one perfect track, autotuning uses computers to shift the pitch of a vocal track as close as possible to the melody the singer was attempting to hit. Depending on how the producer programs the software, the result can either be just slightly off (most pop vocals over the past 5 years), odd, or completely (sometimes deliberately) ridiculous.
The latter two don’t bother me any more than a vocoder or over-dubbing does. It’s when a singer uses Auto-Tune to pretend that they can actually sing (see: Kesha Ke$ha [whoops, sorry], Rihanna, Adam Levine, etc) that I get irritated, because the process of perfection used by the software removes the human element from the song. There’s no problem if it’s a deliberate, artistic choice, but when a program is used in place of human effort and emotion there’s something wrong.
Those slight imperfections in a vocal melody aren’t something that should be covered up and smoothed over. The microvariations in the human voice are what make singing, and speech itself, human; small flaws that betray emotion to a listener. Take them away and you’re left with something that only vaguely resembles a human voice; an uncanny semblance. You have, in other words, Kanye West on 808s.
Though concerned solely with West’s depression after a painful breakup and the death of his mother, 808s is nonetheless fundamentally detached. It’s a collection of songs sung from outside the body, somewhere in-between real and fake emotion. Although the lyrics are painfully direct, West’s vocals are heavily autotuned and not even a single note of the music is acoustic. Everything on the album is generated, treated, or tweaked just a few notes of shy of reality.
The reductive answer to why the album was recorded this way is that West did it in order to make his altered vocals seem somewhat natural. Slant Magazine's Wilson McBee, in an ironically tone-deaf review, criticized West's singing, writing that "West would be unbearable without Auto-Tune.” Though technically correct (no one’s going to claim that West is a brilliant singer) it has about as much worth as noting that the grammar in Adventures in Huckleberry Finn is rather poor.
West is hardly unaware of his vocal shortcomings, which is obvious simply by the fact that he chose to include other, more capable singers on the record. The juxtaposition is obvious and throws West’s heavily processed vocals into even sharper relief. Even the songs that feature something closer to rapping (“Heartless”, “Paranoid”) have heavy autotuning, so clearly West wants his vocals to sound distanced and cold.
The question of why is something that’s up to interpretation. I’d say that it’s something similar to the production techniques I discussed last week in reference to The Weeknd; West is minimizing the human element in his songs to a minimum in order to invite objective analysis. It’s a more musical version of spoken word; I think West is trying to present his lyrics with as little flair as possible so as to invite people to judge them at face value.
As much as this album influenced later hip-hop and rap, I see this album as something influenced by early rap music like “The Message” or Gil-Scott Heron’s proto-rap album, Small Talk At 125th And Lennox. While that music was concerned with politics and a broken society, West is concerned solely with his own life, which has risen to extraordinary heights without providing any real satisfaction (“Welcome To Heartbreak”). This gives an alternative way of seeing West’s production of this album; it’s nothing more than how he feels about his own life. He’s stuck in a depersonalized haze, incapable of really feeling or expressing his pain in a meaningful way. Maybe he chose to present this album as if it were being played through a similar kind of haze, denying others the opportunity to really connect with him. I obviously don’t know West, so I can’t really say.
What West is trying to say is something that should be thought about, and the simple fact that we can ask questions about the album and its content is an example of its quality. It’s listenable because of its production and interesting because of its content. That’s a difficult balance to strike, especially when the production is seemingly designed to obscure and distort the content, but West pulled it off well with this one. Better yet, it’s a trick that takes what I hate the most about a lot of modern music (synthesized music, autotuned vocals) and turns them on their head, giving their use a convenient defense. That heavy production is one of the things that really turns me off of new music, and good usage of it is one of the things I’m looking to explore in this column.
Cheers all. ‘Til next week.
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