![808s and heartbreak type beat 808s and heartbreak type beat](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OxMzr4KyUpE/maxresdefault.jpg)
That's because it capitalized upon a zeitgeist that was clearly already underway, courtesy of Lil Wayne. While the popular narrative now is that 808s and Heartbreak was widely hated and later discovered as an influential stealth classic, as far as I remember it got pretty positive reviews while spawning two of Kanye's biggest singles ever, and everyone at the time basically agreed it was obviously going to be incredibly influential. There was even a song with Lil Wayne, "See You in My Nightmares," where Wayne embraced the howling, pitch-corrected chaos of the album to nearly unintelligible effect (while I love Wayne, I'd argue he continued his tradition, started the year before on "Barry Bonds," of showing up on the worst Kanye singles). After "Put On," Kanye began rolling out the album's singles: "Love Lockdown," "Heartless," etc. Which brings us back to 808s and Heartbreak.
![808s and heartbreak type beat 808s and heartbreak type beat](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9geXBowj-xM/maxresdefault.jpg)
If there were ever a moment to start taking the technology seriously in a way that T-Pain and Ron Browz couldn't ask us to, it was then. Wayne had the biggest album in the country (one of the biggest of all time) and the biggest song, and that song was slathered in Auto-Tune. It has gone on to become a cult classic in 2013, Complex named it the 12th best Lil Wayne song of all time.īy the time Tha Carter III was actually ready to come out, Wayne had moved on to a different, more playful Auto-Tune single with less unguarded honest and much sharper songwriting: "Lollipop." In the spring of 2008, it hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100, just in time for the album release. It was a beautiful improvisation that predicted basically everything Lil Wayne would build his sound around for the next decade. It was a song with a kind of emotional honesty that Wayne rarely showed, brought out by the careening power of Wayne's singing in Auto-Tune, which he did for six minutes, including four minutes of what was essentially an outro of him gurgling. All he asked was that she keep no secrets, that she never lie, that she keep it real. Here, Wayne suggested there was a jersey with his name on it at the top of the arena because he was willing to give up the game for this girl. The hook goes "I wouldn't care if you were a prostitute / and that you hit every man that you ever knew." Compared to Wayne's usual approach to romance on songs ("get money, fuck bitches"), it was a revelation. "Prostitute Flange" is one of the weirdest love songs ever made, although by the weirdo standards of 2017 it might sound predictable, as groundbreaking music often does. That version, of course, leaked, and among the songs that spilled into the ether never to be formally released was one called "Prostitute Flange," ostensibly dedicated to Wayne's girlfriend at the time, Karrine "SupaHead" Steffans. It began to crop up on odd verses, and it eventually made its way into entire songs, including a few destined for the original version of Tha Carter III. In 2007, in the midst of his legendary mixtape tear, Lil Wayne began playing with Auto-Tune. For that, let's return to the other biggest rapper in the world from 2007 to 2008, Lil Wayne, and his parallel timeline.