Kanye’s classic ‘808s’ turns 10 A look back at its influence on hip-hop.
One of the only good things Kanye West has done this year is collectively remind us that “Paranoid” exists. It’s a song that almost certainly wouldn’t make the cut for his set list – if West still played live shows (he’s only made a handful of concert appearances since canceling his Saint Pablo tour in 2016) – a nonsingle, new-wave throwaway from his 2008 album “808s and Heartbreak.”
Yet onstage at the Camp Flog Gnaw festival on Nov. 11, suspended in a transparent box midair, West and Kid Cudi – the rapper who West has credited with crafting the sound of “808s” – muscled through an Autotune-free version of “Paranoid,” an incredibly rare live appearance of a song that isn’t just one of West’s underrated classics, but also emblematic of his most forward-thinking album.
“808s” turned 10 on Saturday, but critics certainly haven’t waited for the album’s anniversary to hail it a classic. Books’ worth of essays have been written about “808s” as the precedent for the next 10 years of hip-hop, depicting how West’s moody vocals and minimalist club beats inspired a generation of artists to blur the line between singing and rapping, to overshare their emotions in openly-emo lyrics, to make music that’s simultaneously made to party to and entirely joyless.
It’s a lineage that stretches from Drake and the Weeknd to the Soundcloud rap phenomenon of the past few years. And a look at the rappers on top of this week’s Hot 100 reveals just how broad the album’s influence can be extended – would Travis Scott and Juice WRLD be making the same kind of music if it wasn’t for “808s”?
While it’s certainly a stretch to credit every time we hear a rapper sing a verse to Kanye West – a claim that the rapper and his massive ego would nevertheless appreciate – it’s undeniable that “808s” was a groundbreaking release. It didn’t seem that way in 2008, when West released a 12-song album that shared few characteristics with his previous three critically and commercially beloved releases, 2004’s “The College Dropout,” 2005’s “Late Registration” and 2007’s “Graduation.”
Gone were his trademark soul samples and the flashy crowd-pleasing hits, replaced by spare production and AutoTuned vocals.
West recorded “808s” coming off a series of personal tragedies, including the death of his mother and his split with his fiancee Alexis Phifer, and his melancholy is pervasive on the album. Why, listeners asked, was one of hiphop’s most engaging rappers choosing instead to warp his voice into a robotic monotone and abandon the kind of songs that made him famous to make a synthpop album?
As we know now, West was just hearing the future. “808s” may not have sounded like rap music in 2008, but it absolutely sounds like the kind of genreless, rap-sung, in-my-feelings hiphop you can hear anywhere in 2018. And as his contemporaries started to imitate him – most immediately with Drake, whose debut mix tape “So Far Gone” dropped several months post-“808s,” with the then-upstart rapper citing West as the release’s biggest influence – West had moved on, taking the experimental impulses of “808s” and pumping them full of hip-hop star power on the album that many see as his magnum opus, 2010’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”
The rest of hip-hop hasn’t stopped being inspired by the album. What West needs to prove is whether he’ll ever be able to inspire in the same way again.