Jackson Free Press

There aren't too many reasons to be impressed with the last year in music. There were several radio hits that we weren't embarrassed to listen to with the window down; songs that we instinctively knew we would dance to when it came on at a bar in 20 years. Lil' Wayne's "Mr. Carter," Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" and Estelle's "American Boy" are three songs among many that we can already pen into our children's prom playlists.

The real difficulty is picking the year's best album. There were many exceptional albums released that stand out even within their own impressive catalogs: Alejandro Escovedo's "Real Animal"; Drive-By Truckers' "Brighter Than Creation's Dark"; Ryan Adams' "Cardinology"; The Hold Steady's "Stay Positive"; and David Byrne and Brian Eno's "Everything that Happens Will Happen Today," to name a few. While all these albums were great, none of them truly stood out as the "best."

Kanye West's "808s and Heartbreak," however, was the most audacious hip-hop record since Andre 3000 eschewed the genre in 2003 with "The Love Below." Both "The Love Below" and "808s," while undeniably grounded in hip-hop, strived to transcend the genre's constraints. Both of them looked to the past in order to create a unique sound and different musical direction.

On the surface, "808s" is a gimmick album—West recorded the entire set over a TR-808 drum machine (a staple of many old-school hip-hop classics) and filtered his vocals through an auto-tune (which Busta Rhymes recently used on "Arab Money"). The concept of the album is questionable, but it sucks you in from the first listen.

From the first bars of the opening song, "Say You Will," through the surreal beauty of "Street Lights," you can tell that Kanye is serious about this gimmick. He sees the self-imposed limitations as a challenge. Having mastered the pop-rap genre, he is setting out to chart new musical territory for himself by thinking old-school in a genre whose sound is growing increasingly high-tech.

When it comes to his lyrics, they are what we have come to expect from Kanye: simple, predictable and stupid. But there has always been something sticky to his words, something that keeps us quoting them. There has always been something poignant in their inanity. His lyrical style works especially well on "808s." His topic of choice on the album is loneliness after a bitter break-up, which he sings about so broadly that everyone who has ever experienced it has to relate to it at least a little bit.

Of course, there are flaws to the record, too. There is a little extra fat on some of the songs that Kanye could have trimmed and a guest spot or two the album could have done without. However, despite the flaws, no artist creatively risked more than Kanye West in 2008, and no mainstream artist put anything nearly as adventurous as close to the top of the charts.