By: Ricky Perez Cardoza

‘808s and Heartbreak’, Kanye West’s 4th studio album, was released in 2008 and is regarded as one of the most, or the most, influential albums for hip hop ever made.

To start, we’ll get the story of the album out of the way and also its history. This album by Kanye was never planned at all and the original album he was going to release was an album finishing off the now trilogy of his college albums, making it a quadrilogy, and was an album that would’ve sounded like ‘The College Dropout’ and ‘Late Registration’. Things changed for Kanye when his then perfect life went into shambles by him losing his mother.

Donda West was announced dead on November 10, 2007, when she was 58 years old after a post plastic surgery procedure went wrong. She had liposuction, a tummy tuck, and a breast reduction. It was found after her passing that her death was caused by heart failure due to multiple post operative factors. During this time, Kanye also lost his girlfriend at the time, Alexis Phifer, who ended things with him.

Kanye had to stop working on his next album and completely scraped it all together to start working on ‘808s and Heartbreak’. This time Kanye had to completely change his sound from egotistical, narcissistic, bars with sped-up soul samples, and completely hip-hop-focused rap songs, to something that he could portray the emotions he was feeling in a way that would come across as hurt, guilt, and tribute to his mother.

Kanye West then went completely south and gave us his 12-song album that would completely change the way new rappers would make music. Kanye ditches the soul samples and makes original beats with a focus on the heavy-hitting electro and dark 808s with pop singing filtered auto-tune. Also, using mostly pianos and humming from him, to make a melodic feel to the instrumentals was something that people in hip-hop had never seen before.

He also doesn’t rap on this album, or at least not like he did on his other previous albums. He sings throughout most of the album. He shows us emotional singing. It’s one of Kanye’s saddest listens for a lot of people who knew what happened to him. But fans of Kanye West didn’t like this album at the time.

The people who did like him were the kids and teenagers who loved his emotional singing and hard-hitting 808s combined with hip-hop. This is what most people regard as the start of the influence this single album had. By getting attention from the younger generation it would go on to influence any young artists during this time to make music just like this.

The influence wasn’t instant either; it was something that took time and it started to show with the come-up of rappers such as Lil Uzi Vert, Juice Wrld, XXXTENTACION, Trippie Red, Post Malone, Future, Drake, and Kid Cudi. It’s hard to think of these rappers without the influence that 808s has on them. We got tracks like Lil Uzi verts 2018 hit: “XO TOUR LIFE” where we see the hardest influence of ‘808s and Heartbreak’. We see the same in Juice Wrld’s hit “Lucid Dreams”. Lil Uzi Vert and Juice Wrld both regard this album that “saved their life” as one of their favorite albums ever.

Listening to songs like “Heartless” and “Street Lights” of ‘808s and Heartbreak’ we can hear the clear influence these songs and the album have on songs like “XO TOUR LIFE” and on rappers as a whole. No other album has ever had an impact on the sound of future generations like ‘808s and Heartbreak’ and that is why most people regard it as “The most influential album ever”.