808s & Heartbreak

I hate this, I hate this, I hate everything about this, what's waiting for me in this essay is really bad.

I literally said I didn't want to talk about this motherfucker ever again not that long ago, so how about instead of talking about the pertaining artist I just call him "Rey". Giving this dude more attention is a sin but I'm too honest to not.

This is my fault. I wouldn't be writing about this if I didn't get curious.

In a list I assembled ... wow, 3 years ago, I put my best album of 2008 as the William Parker Quartet's "Petit Oiseau". I really like that album, but over time I had to admit to myself that a. it was too long, b. I didn't really have much to say about it and c. the tracks are kinda same-y, resulting in d. I don't listen to it that much. The point of these lists is to think deeply about art in general and why some things stick and why some don't, and "Petit Oiseau", as much as I enjoy its vibrancy and color, didn't have any of the qualities that made it stick around. Even compared to contemporary jazz albums that I love and have a special place in my heart, like Makaya McCraven's "Universal Beings" (2018) and Jaimie Branch's "Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (World War)" (2023), it just paled in comparison.

So, as I do at night when I get very bored, I start looking up albums I hadn't listened to. I flipped through album after album in 2008, thinking, "There has to be one that I really gel with." Fleet Foxes' self-titled? I like Fleet Foxes, but that one's too precious. Portishead's "Third"? Never had any chemistry with it; I can appreciate it sonically, but I never perceived Beth Gibbons' vocals mixing well with the music. (I feel like Beth, oddly, is too blunt.) Hercules & Love Affair's self-titled? Eh. Vampire Weekend's self-titled (interesting trend going on here)? Also too precious.

Reflecting on it, the end of the 2000s was an interesting moment for "indie rock". I was going through memory lane with Dirty Projectors' "Bitte Orca" (didn't age well), Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavilion" (eh) and Grizzly Bear's "Veckatimest" (aged pretty well), and all of these albums are ... charming. There's an interesting detachment to the music bookending the 2000s, which detachment wasn't cynical or satirical or technical. Maybe the correct word is "naive". It's charming to hear Noah Lennox sing about domesticity; it's charming to hear Robin Pecknold sing about foxes in the snow; it's charming to hear Cut Copy sing about ice-skating.

This just doesn't cut it for me. Maybe I'm such a miserable person, I dunno, but at this point I favor certain attributes in music: 1. immediacy, 2. emotional power, and 3. a willingness to play / mess with the audience. Every year I always managed to find an album that reciprocated these values back to me, but 2008 kinda felt like a series of caterers smilingly delivering the same cold-cuts to me. And my OCD could not let this go: this was my "Aguirre, Wrath of God" moment, damnit.

And so I scrolled and scrolled, and saw it. "808s & Heartbreak".

I smirked and, with a shrug, put it on. I started with "Amazing".

It began with a shiver. A revulsion took over me. Then, in horror, I played "Bad News". As I thought about the effect the music had on me, I realized that I put myself between Scylla and Charybdis. I wish I hadn't opened that damn box, and I'm too honest a person to not admit the box was opened.

The problem with "808s & Heartbreak" is that it's calculated to appeal to me.

It checks out criteria 1 and 2, that of immediacy and emotional power; but what about 3, playfulness? As background: I never took "808s & Heartbreak" seriously before. I always thought it was an album that ... "Rey" shat out and then tried to position as, "Oh ho ho, I'm serious!" I like Rey's music but he does this all the time; I thought it was a commercial product that was unintentionally, because of Rey's ... let's say "candor", personal.

Compared to every other album I heard, which was pretty transparent about what they were doing (which I have nothing against, it just doesn't appeal to me), Rey ending the album with "Pinocchio Story" was inspired and haunting. Recorded live in Singapore, the crowd is so loud on "Pinocchio Story". Rey is singing "It's so crazy, I thought I had it figured out, / but for some reason I can never find what real love is about," and the crowd is screaming, drowning him out. Rey is literally surrounded by people and is alone among them. Considering the themes of the album - distance and disassociation, as depicted by the Autotune and the Roland TR-808 drum machine - it's a perfect end for the album. I was so mad.

It's not like "808s" is entirely future-seeing. What dates it is exactly what I have been talking about concerning 2008 and 2009: it's corny as hell. Rey's innocence is the same as Robin Pecknold's, Ezra Koenig's. For the most part, Rey doesn't rap; in fact, many of the songs are lullabies. So, returning to "Amazing":

I'm a monster, I'm a killer, I know I'm wrong, I'm a problem, that'll never ever be solved,

which is a cute idea. Nearly two decades into the future - oh I don't even want to think about the passage of time - we are so soaked into our postmodern pessimism that Rey being bummed out about being less than human seems quaint. And yet, artist as Rey is, what's important is the ultimate effect he achieves. Take the chorus: there's the simple, crisp loop of the 808, which is overlaid with a pseudo-chorus and the repeated grunt of "ooh", and Rey crooning, dead inside, "It's amazing, so amazing, so amazing, so amazing," as if he can't even come to care and yet he has to go through this whole ordeal for some fucking reason. The overall album has the feel of winter, of dead leaves rattling and branches waving in the air; when analyzed from this angle, Rey's ornate production, which is in sharp contrast to the simple 808, seems ... mocking, as if he is making fun of himself in all his misery. There's real, "you're sad because you fucking suck and because you suck you don't deserve to be anything but sad."

And then Young Jeezy enters in and that's where my highminded analysis ends. Again: there's a naivety and lack of awareness running underneath this album, but that is also true of all the music at the end of this decade.

Returning back to "Bad News", what opens that song is just Rey, a piano (? it's not credited in Wikipedia, but that's what it sounds like), and ... a synth. Corny as it is - and Rey has said he was influenced by synth-pop, so he may have not really understood what he was ripping off - the synth actually aids in the impression that Rey has, in fact, turned into a machine. And so he croons,

Didn't you know I was waiting on you? Waiting on a dream that'll never come true,
Didn't you know I was waiting on you, My face turned to stone when I heard the news,

and then, when Rey gets to "when you decide to break the rules", the way "decide", "break" and "rules is vocalized makes it seem his voice is cracking from the strain. It's a pretty incredible effect.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but Rey sounds like ... well ... he sounds like Ray Charles! Obviously he doesn't have the power of Ray's voice, the shine and earth of Ray's voice, and yet he has something of Ray's ability to direct his voice. When Ray mumbles, in "You Don't Know Me", the title of the song, or when he stretches "I'm juuust a friend", I hear some of Rey's vocalizations, his ability to draw a word out, tease emotions, and linger on a word, to find additional meaning behind a word.

Was Rey aware of this? I. Don't. Fucking. Know. I know "Yee -" - err, "_Ree_zus", is probably all deliberate, but "808s" I can't quite say.

But beyond listening to these two songs and "Pinocchio Story", there was also the fact that, prior to this re-listen, I loved "Paranoid" and "RoboCop". That's like half the tracklist, scattered throughout the album too, not clustered in one location for easy access. That's good news for a listener, but bad news for me, who doesn't want to give Rey any credit for anything anymore.

And so, rather than completing a full review of the album's tracklist - I should, but seriously, I really don't want to talk about Rey for the moment - I'll talk about the song that has haunted me for the last few months, which I absolutely hadn't heard until recently: "Street Lights", which ... could be Rey's greatest song in his career. Well okay, "Gone" is a top contender, and "Everything I Am" is somewhere in a top ten list.

But "Street Lights" is ... it's something else. I find the opening verse haunting:

Let me know do I still have time to grow? Things ain't always set in stone, that being known, let me know.

We know the story behind "808s & Heartbreak": it came directly after the deterioration in his personal relationships but, most importantly, his mother's death.

It's probably a terrible idea for me to get into this but it's too interesting a conversation to pass: if anyone "got" Rey the most, it was his mother, and the reason why this is so is because Rey is a lot of things and he wants to be everything, and this is so because Rey is a crazy person who isn't satisfied with being good at one thing. Because Rey is a crazy person, everyone - and I mean everyone - in the world nods their head at Rey's aspirations and tries to direct him into one or two slots, which does not make Rey happy whatsoever. Donda West, who was a rather neat person, was able to direct Rey in one of his pursuits without shrinking any of Rey's horizons. A lover, whose only role is to love, could not do this; a wife, whose only role is to coexist, could not do this; a mother, whose role is to observe and accept, could do this, which is what Donda was.

Am I a family member of the Wests, am I a friend, am I an insider, no, am I making baseless speculations, yes. But I do think this is observable in Rey's public actions. For whatever reason Rey has the maturity of a rock and sees relationships as transactional; he does not grow alongside people, he does not relegate or submit or humble himself unto other people. With men, his primary relationship is, where there is not mutual respect, intimidation; with women, his primary relationship lies along his penis. His relationship with his mother was fundamentally different, neither of transaction nor of reward.

Again, though, this is an entirely baseless speculation. But, as a grown-up man-child myself, I feel like this is somewhere along the path of being right, even though, again, it's baseless speculation.

So, having said all of this baseless speculation, you realize how heartbreaking it is, such that the word actually has meaning here, to hear Rey sing "Let me know." His mother was his mentor, his friend, his muse, I assume (given the content of "College Dropout" (2004), "Late Registration" (2005) and "Graduation" (2007), anyway), and he's asking her spirit to let him know ... anything, but, most importantly, whether he has a future. I recall Rey memorably responding to a reporter that he would, at the time of interview, be spending his time in Australia staring at the back of his eyelids. That's how dark his future was preceding the development of "808s".

In that same context, "Things ain't always set in stone" isn't a truth, it's a prayer. It's also a lie. Following this verse is:

Seems like street lights glowing happen to be just like moments passing in front of me so I hopped in the cab, and I paid my fare, see I know my destinaton, but I'm just not there in the streets,

which analogy, of the what is to us flowing, continuous nature of time to the passage of static street lights, which have a fixed location and the brutal reality of a ticking clock, is almost a perfect description of the freezing nature of grief. Time is supposed to be moving in this car; it isn't, and that's what the song is about. Time cannot reverse, but time doesn't move forward, so ... how am I even here?

And then, this devastating couplet:

I'm just not there, life's just unfair.

It's not Shakespearean, and yet it portrays all of Rey's psychology perfectly: he's not denying what happened, he's not lying about what he lost, he's not pretending he's above his grief, it's just ... unfair. It's just not fair. It's just not part of a happy, good, and honest life. It's just unfair. It's simple in its brutality.

Again, the verses are beneath something the Elizabethan playwrights would have penned, but considering Donda drilled into Rey the works of black poets, "Street Lights" has the effect of powerful poetry; it lacks the vocabulary, but it has the economy of word usage, the knowledge of when to put an emotional pause, the power of an image, even if a simple one, and a bluntness and directness of language that still hides what the language is trying to convey. Rey isn't really known as a great lyricist, and yet "Street Lights" has a great poetic feeling that comes from the great urge of the artist to express themself.

So...yeah. In the beginning of this essay, before I undertook this endeavor, I did not want to give Rey any credit for anything; having now reached its end, it's just evident: this is not only the greatest album of 2008, it's one of the greatest albums of the 2000s, corniness and all. It is so mysterious and absurd that its own artist cannot understand it.

How to talk about a person you don't really want to talk about; or, Least Sane Fan

I workshopped several ends for this essay before getting exhausted and frustrated. I came to the same conclusion that I got to when writing about the 2025 releases for "Bully": it's better just to ignore Rey, especially after I found out, in the middle of writing this up, there are allegations that he sexually assaulted someone around the time of "808s" (you can look that up yourself, it's covered in Rolling Stone, People, whatever).

And, as I workshop yet another ending for this essay, I just ... I don't know. So, ending #153: you want to separate the artist from the art, and yet the value of the art is that the artist is a ... person. Okay, fine, there was that one machine-generated song that became super popular on Spotify, but you're reminded of what Ray Kroc said about McDonald's: it's not a burger business, it's a real-estate business. That kind of art is just there until some other art fills in the void.

What do you do if the artist is a huge asshole? I'm currently reading de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" which I, to my complete surprise, love, and one of the things that gives me comfort while reading it is that de Sade is dead and I know quite well he paid dearly for his crimes - possibly not enough, but still. Rey is still alive, but it's not like he committed any crime (yet). But, you know, espousing an ideology that argues against the existence of other people for the sake of what seems like trolling is ... well, it is what it is. Although, I guess to be fair to Rey, there are people aplenty who wish he didn't exist. It doesn't justify what he's said and done, but it makes some sense.

Anyway...whatever. I don't have a good answer for any of this. Like everything else that has been going on lately, I can only watch. I do make this observation, however: Rey is getting close to being artistically dead, like, maybe nowhere near Vanilla Ice-dead but somewhere approximate to that circle of Hell (which isn't a bad Hell all things considered). A great artist can reasonably coast their past successes, see: Weezer, so long as they give the impression that they can tap into that energy they had in the past. I think Bowie did this to marvellous effect in the last decade of his life, and I still think Joni Mitchell can come back even after a freaking brain aneurysm.

That's Rey's big problem: there's provocateur-as-airs and provocateur-as-personality. Rey is the latter. If you are a provocateur seemingly for artistic reasons, as in, your assholishness inevitably returns to your art, then, for good or for bad, you can be forgiven for doing what is ostensibly your job. Rey is just an asshole and he thrives on it. He is allergic to the concept of anyone telling him No because the denial strikes him as coming from some prejudice against him or the vague concept of Ingenuity. He has trained himself to essentially Karen his way out of a denial. He therefore thinks being an asshole is morally justified. Frankly, Rey is not that special for behaving in this way; somehow for some godforsaken reason every public male figure in America has Karen-ified recently, wanting to speak to the manager when they own the fucking restaurant. It is an impressively advanced way of bargaining with God when that God doesn't exist (and I say this as someone who believes in God). The difference between Rey and all the others, and what could be called his """""saving grace""""", is that Rey is an artist. He is essentially in a class of people known for not being important (which class I belong to). Rey can't pretend he's good at something, when in reality he's good for nothing, and so he isn't given the power to really ruin the lives of millions of people.

But, returning to the subject of his art, Rey isn't interested in returning back to the subjects of his past material (which is a good thing), but neither is he interested in withdrawing from the public to interiorize where he is and who he is at the moment, which is one of the roads to great art. He seems to equate withdrawing from public spats as "losing", because, again, he thinks the very act of arguing means he is morally righteous. And, to leave the realm of the abstract, that's what "Bully" (2026) is: it's him pretending he's still "Watch the Throne" (2011) Rey and not just someone else, a divorced husband, a dad, an artist possibly in his sunset (which is fertile material). The album is interesting when you get the sense the music is hiding something he doesn't want to say, as "Damn"; it is most assuredly not interesting when he retreads what he did in Vultures 1 through 55.

Like, you know who else is kinda a huge asshole? Jay-Z, and Jay-Z tackled all of this on "4:44", and every time I want to give Jay-Z shit for anything I say, "Well, he made 4:44 (one of the greatest rap albums I've ever heard in my life)." I understand Jay is a millionaire or billionaire or whatever, but what he does on "4:44" is very brave. The power of "Kill Jay Z" haunts me to this very day. Rey has not been brave for a very, very long time, so much so that, if courage is a muscle, one is right to question whether he can flex it again.

Anyway, whatever. That's all.

Postscript

I didn't realize Rey's father was actually Ray West. I was thinking of Rey Mysterio. Who I guess is another deadbeat dad. Huh. Weird coincidence.