I know I’m the most influential / That TIME cover was just confirmation
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After the death of his mother Donda and the breakup of him and his fiancée Alexis Phifer, we saw a dramatic shift in the tone of his music. The easy going poppy aspects of his last album Graduation were thrown out the window, as Kanye took the biggest artistic risk of his career in the midst of a deep depression. At arguably the peak of his popularity and the biggest rapper in the world, he made an album primarily composed of singing using an autotune voice filter. While the album had some popular songs (“Heartless” and “Love Lockdown”), it didn’t have the cultural impact at the time like his other albums had. When 808s dropped hip-hop was in the middle of the ringtone rap era, a weird time in rap history that made Soulja Boy way more popular than he had any right being and “Throw Some Ds” a certifiable hit. What 808s brought was a vulnerability to hip-hop, just raw emotion coming from a broken man that we had not seen before.
The importance of Kanye singing along with rapping interchangeably cannot be understated, as it has spawned a whole new generation of rap. Drake is the biggest rapper in the world right now because of his crossover appeal between demographics, as he can appeal to the streets and rap with If You’re Reading This and sing to all the lonely girls with Take Care. What Kanye did with 808s was further blur the definition of what it was to be a rapper, which has no doubt benefitted the likes of Young Thug, Future, Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino, and Kid Cudi (who was a large inspiration to the creation of 808s). |