"Love Lockdown" failed to be the anthem I needed at a time I so desperately sought refuge, solace, and meaning in music. Bob Dylan's infamous Blood On The Tracks concurrently impacted me in a similar way, but White's mournful voice over R&B and disco grooves hit differently. I'd trudge up and down Queens Boulevard with "I Don't Know Where Love Has Gone" and the cathartic closing title track booming in my headphones, trying to make sense of things. At the time, I'd firmly latched onto one of the all-time greatest break-up albums, Barry White's 1976 masterpiece Let The Music Play. I share this personal information as context here because, by all rights, I should have absolutely adored a song like "Love Lockdown." With its thematic depiction of a failed romance and its emotional aftermath, the single very much matched my obsessively futurizing mindset. We made a big deal of visiting the Brooklyn Museum early on during the celebrated Japanese pop artist's extensive exhibition there in the Spring of 2008, eagerly watching the animated "Good Morning" music video on a big screen. Funny enough, Graduation had played into the narrative of the relationship, Kanye's embrace of Takashi Murakami for the album and its visuals providing common ground between my then-wife's tastes and my own. We were both still in love, but we'd clearly stopped liking one another, a 24/7 walking contradiction that I wouldn't wish upon my enemies. By the back half of 2008, I had begun eyeing the exits. When "Love Lockdown" dropped, I was nearing the end of a bad marriage, a long relationship I'd entered into too young and in much happier times. The prospect of an entire album's worth of this mess–and then finally hearing the even more upsetting 808s & Heartbreak–further soured me on him, my then-favorite musical artist. By failing as a singer, the producer-turnt-rapper revealed creative imperfection and overreach. The lyrical charms of his prior work had been replaced by this lackluster croon, a limp digital warble that lagged behind both the R&B and vocoder greats alike. I wasn't anti-AutoTune by any stretch, but Kanye seemed to be willfully dulling his instrument by using it. As a fan of synthpop and electronic music generally, the sonic difference between it and its predecessors didn't deter me so much as the vocal processing did. But "Love Lockdown," which I bought off iTunes, gave me pause. My history with Kanye's music was largely an upwards graph up until "Love Lockdown." Even the songs I typically skipped on The College Dropout or Graduation had their merits. The lyrics to "Diamonds From Sierra Leone" throttled my politically progressive mind then, as did his bluntness during the Hurricane Katrina relief telethon days before. hotel lobby after checkout and learning my flight home was delayed.
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That sense of place carried on through Late Registration, which I played sitting in a comfy chair in a Washington D.C.
#KANYE 808S AND HEARTBREAK SAMPLES MOVIE#
In the Fall of 2002, I bought the 2xCD Paid In Full movie soundtrack and stood on a Long Island Railroad platform in the outer reaches of Queens with my Discman as Dame Dash formally introduced him as a rapper on the sprawling Roc-A-Fella posse cut "Champions." That I distinctly remember where I was the first time I heard Kanye rap is not lost on me. I obsessed over his work in the Roc-A-Fella production canon, marveled at his contributions to Talib Kweli's Quality, and delighted every time I came across a beat of his in the wild. His beats on Jay-Z's The Blueprint immediately caught my ear, not unlike how Just Blaze's did on the same album. And while I could spend the next several paragraphs railing against his lazy, grift-based, conspiratorial alignment with quasi-conservativism and Christian hucksterism, I'd rather focus on that song.īut before I do, I should emphasize that I was an early adopter of Kanye's work, about as close to a day-one as I've ever been with a hip-hop superstar (save for maybe Bad Bunny). Disappointment, dismay, and even disgust have since become inevitabilities in my decades-long connection to him as a listener and music critic. The first time Kanye West lost me was "Love Lockdown." It would happen multiple times over the next decade or so, with increasing frequency and velocity, up to and through his gladhanding of Donald Trump.