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The Fader reports from 808’s and Heartbreak listening party

2:33 p.m. · October 15, 2008 · by Andrew Winistorfer

Kanye West held a listening party for 808’s and Heartbreak in L.A. (in coordination with artist Vanessa Beecroft) last night, and the Fader was there to report the happenings. Apparently, 808’s is indeed completely sung by Kanye (not rapped) and he uses a vocoder throughout (because it’s cool). Young Jeezy does the only rapping on the album, and Kanye duets with Lil Wayne.

Those are some juicy tidbits about the album, out in November, but the party itself was quite a spectacle:

After waiting in a loading area with an open bar and a DJ, we walked up a driveway illuminated by florescent lights to a darkened room where approximately forty nude women, most of them wearing face-obscuring masks seemingly made of faux lamb's wool, stood in the middle—black girls in the front, white girls in the back. Then the entire album played without introduction or explanation. The women were backlit by glowing lights—mostly red and purple, sometimes strobing, often pulsing and sporadically illuminating. When "Love Lockdown" played three songs in, some of the models started sitting down on the floor, others going so far as to fully recline by the end of the album.

 

Once the album ended with "Coldest Winter"—the one song on the album about his mother, the rest of this breakup album is about "someone else"—West appeared with a microphone. After eventually silencing the chatty room, he introduced Beecroft, who revealed that the piece was conceptualized and executed in one week, which is one third of the time it took West to record the entire album. Then West delivered a monologue about how this album is about the freedom to do what you want to do and that he used Auto-Tune because it is the most fun thing ever. Then he said 808s & Heartbreak was about emotional nakedness. Then he said he'll have another album out next June.

Another album out in June? Is that one going to be Good Ass Job? I hope so, that title is awesome. But back to the naked ladies—what was the point of that? Maybe they stood as a metaphor for the clash between music and sex. It’s probably po-mo and I don’t understand it.

At any rate, you have to hand it to Kanye for having an ego big enough to try singing an album instead of rapping. It’d be like Thom Yorke dropping a Dr. Dre-produced hip-hop record after OK Computer. [The Fader]