In 2002, Kanye West – known at the time mostly for his contributions to hip-hop
as a producer – recorded "Through the Wire."
He rapped it just a few weeks after his
infamous car accident while his jaw was completely wired shut.
It's not crisp and clear.
"If this ain't clear at all, man.
They got my mouth wired shut for like I don't know the doctor said like six weeks.
You know we had reconstru... I had reconstructive surgery"
Not many artists would record their debut
single in that condition, but Kanye did, and that decision illustrates something
very very unique about his work.
"Kanye West almost considers the best, ideal, most
greatest instrument ever to be the human voice."
Now a traditional hip-hop track
consists of an instrumental beat and a vocal. What makes Kanye such an
innovative producer is how he's never really limited a vocal performance to
just singing or rapping. He's filled every single nook and cranny of his
music with the human voice and it's always pushed hip hop forward.
Kanye's debut album, The College Dropout, was released in 2004.
It's an hour and 16 minutes, 21 tracks.
It's literally jam-packed with music and one of the
standout tracks on that album is "Jesus Walks." It won him a Grammy and got him a
BET nomination for Best Gospel Artist.
His use of the gospel song "Walk with Me" by
the ARC Choir fills the entire song to the brim with vocal samples. They become
the baseline, the percussion, and the melody – and it's even layered over more
vocal samples like this military drill sargeant:
And that exotic flute sound:
It's actually John Legend's voice.
Kanye layers vocals like choirs a lot. He does it throughout Late Registration on songs
like "Hey Mama," "Celebration," and "Crack Music." On these tracks he's not really
manipulating the vocals at all. On the final track your hearing a recognizable
human voice:
But on his next album, Graduation, a very synth and electronic driven record, Kanye
starts doing something different:
"So he chose synthesizers that sound like vocals, but it's important because the
orientation – the orbit here – is still around the human voice."
You can hear that very
clearly on "Good Life" featuring T-Pain especially in the first couple of
seconds:
And even more so on 808s and Heartbreak. Kanye doesn't have a great
voice, even he'll admit that, but he sings in nearly every song on 808s and
sometimes he sings the entire song. Of course, with the help of auto-tune.
He does
this especially well on the opening track "Say You Will" where that booming 808
drum alternates in your left and right ear, while synthy vocals fill the space
like a choir:
Now, seven years after he released that track he chose to re-release it, but
instead of that synthy instrumentation he enlisted Caroline Shaw to record
acapella:
Shaw is the youngest person to win a Pulitzer Prize in music and she's
known especially for how she composes vocals.
West was the single producer on
all 21 tracks of The College Dropout, but by 808s he's starting to curate
really top talent to help him push hip-hop forward.
According, to Pitchfork it
really marked the birth and flowering of West's creative CEO method of album
making. Now My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is eight songs shorter than The
College Dropout, but it runs nearly as long and it really stands out because
it's the first time where Kanye turns the conventional structure of a rap song
completely on its head.
A great example of this is the song "Runaway." At nine minutes
it's far longer than any normal hip-hop track and five minutes and 45 seconds in
Kanye really pushes into new territory with a really interesting counter melody:
Now the first thing you hear is that solo piano melody introduced at the very
beginning of the song. It's super, super, memorable and then you hear Kanye's
voice:
But it's processed through a vocoder to sound like a distorted guitar
now he could have easily disguised that vocal completely but instead he chose to
reveal that it was his voice by seemingly testing it out before diving
into the counter melody. According to Rolling Stone "there's no way it should
work but it keeps rolling for three more minutes without breaking a spell."
That outro is longer than most rap songs.
If My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was
Kanye's maximilist perfect album, then Yeezus is bare bones minimalism.
It's Kanye deconstructed.
Everything that Kanye was known for up to that point: pitched up
vocals, autotune, choir samples, layered voices – they're all here – but they're
spliced into songs without much decoration or orchestration.
For instance,
take a listen to this pivot on "New Slaves:"
Or the transition from a sample to a vocal on "Bound 2:"
Or these blown-out, layered vocals from Justin Vernon on "Hold My Liquor:"
Now, "Ultralight Beam" from 2016's The Life of Pablo is a culmination of everything
Kanye has produced since The College Dropout.
It's a gospel song like "Jesus
Walks," but instead of sampling an existing choir – he created his own. Like
"Runaway" it doesn't have a traditional structure and its sparse and minimal like
Yeezus:
The choir, led by gospel artist Kirk Franklin sounds like it's recorded in a
church even though it's probably in a pretty small studio.
"They sound close.
They sound far. They sound loud. They sound quiet."
At 4:20 they're right in
your ear. By 4:25 they sound distant:
But right where you expect him
to rap – he doesn't. He passes the mic to Chance the Rapper whose voice matches
the emotion of the song so perfectly it's instantly clear why:
"This is my part nobody else speak. This is my part nobody else speak. This little light
of mine."
"Glory be to God. Imma make sure that they go where they can't go."
"If they don't wanna ride imma still give them raincoats know what God said when he
made the first rainbow: just throw this at the end if I'm too late for the intro."
Kanye West started his career as a producer known basically for one thing:
those pitched up vocals.
Almost nobody would
put him at the top of the list of best rapper alive, but ever since his decision
to rap with his jaw wired shut
he's used the human voice as his weapon to bring hip-hop into a completely new
space.
And he's still looking for the edge of where he can push the human
voice.