This was the moment, just after his iconic shutter shades, when all of his vague ideas about fashion, design, and pop art streamlined with his sharper notions about pop music. “From now on, I want to be seen alongside only the musicians you see in the old black-and-white photographs-Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles.” “Hip-hop is over for me now,” he started saying, dismissively, in interviews. But then he evidently threw out this life script. Kanye West had always been audacious, but this was a new kind of wire-walk.Ĩ08s & Heartbreak was West’s great pivot: He had promised since 2005 that his fourth album would be called Good Ass Job, the capper to his premeditated hip-hop takeover. But his body was twanging with effort as he gripped the mic stand for balance while heaving himself into the music. On take two, he still sounded shaky, badly missing a note even with real-time pitch correction software. The song called for him to sing alone, and he botched the first take in front of the studio audience. There was a manic quality to his promo tour: Just one week before his New Zealand press conference, he was in New York performing 808’s lead single, “Love Lockdown”, on “Letterman”. In the time leading up to the album’s November release, West gave the impression of a man running on fumes, flooring the pedal through the most nightmarish moment in his life. Still reeling from the death of his mother as well as a breakup with his fiancée, he explained how “ 808s came from suffering multitude losses at the same time-it’s like losing an arm and a leg and having to find a way to keep walking through it.” When a reporter asked what he planned to see during his visit to New Zealand, he replied dryly: “The back of my eyelids.'

Sporting Tom Ford shades so dark that they seemed to obscure half his face, he waded through a 40-minute press conference in seeming slow-motion. He was in New Zealand to promote-or perhaps explain- 808s & Heartbreak, the new album he recorded in an ungodly rush amidst his continent-hopping Glow in the Dark tour. Kanye West arrived at Auckland’s Westin Hotel in December 2008 looking exhausted, at the end of every possible rope.

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