808s & Heartbreak - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

808s & Heartbreak is a radical departure from West's previous hip hop albums. 808s & Heartbreak is primarily made up of virtual synthesis, the Roland TR-808 drum machine, and explicitly auto-tuned vocal tracks. Tracks on the album utilize step input drum machine and synth-bass parts. Step input sequencing, a product of vintage analogue devices limited to recording only 16 individual notes, was popular in music production during the 1980s, but also became available in digital workstations.

The album's music features austere production and elements such as dense drums, lengthy strings, droning synths, and somber piano. Andy Kellman of Allmusic writes of the music, "Several tracks have almost as much in common with irrefutably bleak post-punk albums, such as New Order's Movement and The Cure's Pornography, as contemporary rap and R&B." These musical elements help convey moods of despair and dejection that reflect the album's subject matter. Most of the lyrics are directed at an ex-lover; West refers to her treatment of him as "the coldest story ever told" on "Heartless", and on "RoboCop", she is called a "spoiled little L.A. girl" and is compared to the antagonist in the 1990 film Misery. On "Welcome to Heartbreak", West's character faces an existential crisis as he dispassionately recounts sitting alone on a flight, with a laughing family seated ahead of him. He longs for his late mother on the album's penultimate track "Coldest Winter", which samples the desolate 1983 song "Memories Fade" by Tears for Fears.

Pitchfork Media's Scott Plagenhoef categorizes the album as "an introspective, minimal electro-pop record steeped in regret, pain, and even more self-examination than a typical Kanye West album". Music writer Robert Christgau calls it a "slow, sad-ass and self-involved ... breakup album" and analyzes that West's choice to "robotize as well as pitch-correct his voice both undercuts his self-importance and adds physical reality to tales of alienated fame that might otherwise be pure pity parties". Christgau asserts that its final track "Pinocchio Story" is "the only track here about what's really bringing down: not the loss of his girlfriend but the death of his mother, during cosmetic surgery that somewhere not too deep down he's sure traces all too directly to his alienated fame." West's singing has been characterized as "flat" and "nearly unmelodic" which "underscores his own cyborgish detachment." Canadian writer Stephen Marche views that West used "the shallow musical gimmickry of Auto-Tune, a program designed to eliminate individuality, and produced a hauntingly personal album."