Today I got around to listening to 808s and Heartbreak. And you know what it reminds me of? The Mountain Goats' Get Lonely. No, really. They're both essentially concept albums about being dumped, they're both intensely personal, and on these albums both John Darnielle and Kanye dwelled (dwelt?) so much on trying to make the listener feel their sense of loss that they produced albums that were worse than the rest of their work. Both Get Lonely and 808s and Heartbreak are characterized by this sense of vast space. Get Lonely features lots of unbearably slow songs that feature only Darnielle's voice and one haunting acoustic guitar, and 808s and Heartbreak is mostly just Kanye singing with Autotune plus percussion. There's other stuff on the album, but it mostly just serves to highlight. Most of the songs on the album are long, stretching out the emo and attempting to give the songs more weight.

I think one of the reasons the album doesn't really work is that we're used to this kind of thing from, well, The Mountain Goats. And Elliott Smith, and Bon Iver, and Ani Difranco, etc--we're not used to it from pure pop. This sort of crushing rejection, self-doubt and existential angst is both cliché and really difficult to articulate, so listeners want musicians to approach the subject sideways, with metaphor and complex language something less blatant than 'you've broken my heart.' Kanye gives us lines like "don't say you will/unless you will," and most of his lyrical content comes off as clumsy and too surface-level.

I think what he's trying to do with this is interesting--making such a personal, lovelorn and (for better or worse) genuine album that sounds so similar to the R&B pop on the radio that music snobs love to sneer at. I am all for pop music that isn't afraid to be serious. And as a producer, Kanye still has the ability to produce hooks that are fun to listen to and that I can't get out of my head. I think several of the songs work really well on their own, like 'Paranoid' (which has a throwback 80s and Prince sound that I love) and 'RoboCop.' Both of these songs feature more instrumentation and energy than most of the other tracks, as well, abandoning the spaciousness of Kanye's misery to give us well-rounded and catchy songs.

But overall, it falls flat. Maybe this is personal preference: I actually really like Kanye's rapping, and don't like the thought that he's possibly abandoned rap in his music, and I have never liked the way Autotune sounds. I think it's fine for Kanye to experiment and make an album that seems to be more for himself than anyone else. But many defenses of this album that I've read seem to suggest that fans should ignore any faults they hear and love it just because it's personal. I strongly disagree with this. Emotional honesty is not the only rubric of judging an artist's work, and just because Kanye has bared his heart to his listeners doesn't mean that I have any obligation to like the album.