808s is clearly cathartic for Kanye but there’s the odd, uncomfortable (in a good way) sense that this album has all kinds of layers and weirder, more implicit digs at ex-fiancee Alexis. Does anyone else get the feeling the in-the-background talking towards the beginning of “Paranoid” is Kanye and his ex? Some drop of audio he picked up while working on a song or something? Is “Robocop” just a goofball way of calling out his maybe too concerned with the chicks he banged in the past girlfriend or was there some all-out fight between the two where, in the big, dumb heat of the moment Kanye blurted out that she was “like a Robocop”? I’ve made dumber comparisons in a fit of anger.
Whether it is or not, those are the weird things that 808s sounds like it’s hiding all over. And it’s this point too, where the album gets to the universal “personal” of pop: We all do and say real dumb stuff when we’re arguing or fighting with significant others. There are lots of over-the-top love songs and plenty of over-the-top hate songs in pop music, but Kanye’s messing with this rarified perspective that’s both specific to his life and specific to everyone’s lives and focusing on the middle-ground complexities and awkward moments.
“Paranoid” immediately sounds like that Estelle song “American Boy”, if Kanye had produced it instead of Will.I.Am. A monster dance pop song that’s still rough around the edges. The synths fart, the drums whip like a Depeche Mode song, and the “paranoid” doot-doot-doot- synth-line runs underneath it all. Of course, it isn’t a song about paranoia and that’s why the paranoid part gets buried so quick, it’s a song about dealing with a girl who’s paranoid. Kanye invoked Phil Collins a few times in interviews and this song totally starts out like the simplistic rockist sense of atmosphere—play a synth like this=equals paranoia—that you get on something like “In The Air Tonight” and then it just explodes in a house-rap-electro douchebag party jam.
Lyrically though, it shares the weird contempt that musicians like Phil Collins or Don Henley often invoke. It’s a form of misogyny that’s been around way before hip-hop and as I’ve said in a few places now, is far uglier than just saying “bitches ain’t shit”. Again though, Kanye’s sort of playing with that as he bounces between reasonable arguments in the lyrics and condescension in the hook, accusing her of paranoia and talking to her like a child with, “you worry about the wrong things”.
As sissified and emotional as 808s may be, it’s a very male (not masculine) album. That he doesn’t grasp how his girlfriend’s issues with him and his past can’t just be dropped because they’re together, is both romantic and dumbly pragmatic: “All the time you wanna complain about the nights along/So now you’re here with me, show some gratitude, leave the attitude way back at home.”
You can totally see why this relationship didn’t work and there’s the sense that Kanye still doesn’t really get that. Or rather, he probably does at this point but he’s playing off the immediacy of it for the song, That’s why the catchiest song is one of the cruelest.
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