MUSIC REVIEW
JON CARAMANICA


“Do you really have the stamina,” Kanye West wonders to himself on “Pinocchio Story (Freestyle Live From Singapore),”the bizarre hidden track from his fourth album, 808s & Heartbreak,”“for everybody that sees you crying/And says, ‘You oughta laugh! You oughta laugh!’?” Oughtn’t he, though? Mr.West is mouthy, impertinent, flamboyant, bellicose, provocative, greedy and needy. But he is also funny, something, given his profound sense of entitlement, he very rarely gets credit for.

On previous albums he’s hilariously taken himself to task for his foibles of style and narcissism. He rarely aims his daggers at others; there’s plenty in the mirror to clown on.

On “808s & Heartbreak,” which was released by Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam on November 24 in the United States, Mr.West is done cracking jokes.

The product of a tumultuous year in his personal life, it operates solely on the level of catharsis - no commentary, no self-consciousness, no concern for anything but feeling.

And so, as he’s dismantling his storytelling structures, he’s also making his productions skeletal, and largely trading bombastic rapping for vulnerable singing.

“808s & Heartbreak” sounds like none of his other albums. At best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. At worst, it’s clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose. After all, what is Kanye West without scale?

Mr. West would have been forgiven for taking a break after releasing “Graduation,” his third album, last year. His mother, Donda West, died last November following complications from plastic surgery. In April Mr.West split from his fiancee, Alexis Phifer. By any measure, these are seismic changes, yet he persisted with recording.

Every song on the album is rife with anguish, and his lyrics, about the shards of broken relationships, though often tediously written, can carry a fresh sting.

“Let me ask you how long have you known dude,”he raps on“Bad News.
” “You played it off and act like he’s brand new/When did you decide to break the rules-” And the mistrust goes both ways.

“I know of some things that you ain’t told me,” he says on “Heartless.”“I did some things, but that’s the old me.”

And it’s not just the songs that are unmediated; much about this album’s release suggested a lack of filters. Mr.West gave the premiere of the first single, “Love Lockdown,” at the MTV Video Music Awards in September. Then various versions were leaked online. His selfcontrol has faltered too: he has been arrested twice in recent months for tangles with the paparazzi, though charges were not filed in either incident.

For Mr.West, who has always intensely policed his own image, these are shocking ruptures. But they feel nominal up against much of this album, which has the immediacy, looseness and rambling quality of a venting session recorded into a Webcam and posted on YouTube.

In an earlier era, many of the songs on this album would have been demo tapes, left in a vault to await exhumation for an anniversary edition. Now they are the official record, uncertain melodies, banal lyrics and all.

For years Mr.West fought the notion that he was a producer trying to rap. Now he’s an underdog once more, a rapper who wants to sing.

But at the moment, Mr.West can’t sing, and it is that weakness for which this album will ultimately be remembered, some solid songs notwithstanding. For him, using Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction software with the robotic vocal effect, is a true crutch. T-Pain, who has popularized it, can actually hold a tune, which makes the effect more of an accent and less the language itself.

No less a branding visionary than 50 Cent, whom Mr.West last year famously outsold in head-to-head first-week record sales, has criticized Mr.West’s direction on this album, saying, “I don’t think the public will forgive him for it.”50’s wrong on at least one count, though: Mr.West’s fans aren’t loyal to form, they’re loyal to him.

But Mr.West is testing that commitment. For all his self-scrutiny, he has never truly demanded emotional investment. Enjoying his music essentially means enjoying watching someone turn a lens on himself. How Mr.West filters, it turns out, is more compelling than how he feels.