808s & Heartbreak is released

Why it matters

808s & Heartbreak came out November 24, 2008, on Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam. Kanye West recorded it in three weeks, in Hawaii, after the deaths of his mother Donda West (November 2007) and the end of his engagement to Alexis Phifer (April 2008). The album sounds nothing like the three College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation albums that preceded it. Kanye sings most of it through an Auto-Tune effect. There are almost no traditional rap verses on the album. The album sold 450,000 copies in its first week. It was widely panned by rap critics at the time of release as a strange detour from a great catalog. The reputation has flipped completely in the seventeen years since. 808s is now generally cited as one of the most influential rap-adjacent albums of the late 2000s and 2010s: the entire emo-rap, melodic-trap, Drake-and-Kid-Cudi-and-Travis-Scott-and-Future register that dominates 2020s commercial rap descends, audibly, from this album. The Auto-Tune-as-emotional-instrument move that Em scoffed at in 2008 is now the default. You can hear it. Kanye made the album to process loss. The processing tool he built has been used by basically every rapper-singer who came after.