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KanYe West keeps on challenging the limits of hip-hop: if "Graduation" was his pop album, the first single from "808s and Heartaches" sees the star going all soulful and expanding the most spiritual side of former highlights such as "Jesus Walk" or "Can't Tell me Nothing".
Arguably the first interactive recording ever made, thanks to the KanYe's official blog; when the original mix was posted, many fans reacted sending an avalanche of negative feedback; maybe it was the use of popular pitch-altering software autotune, abused in recent times by everyone from Cher to T-Pain, that led the audience to revolt and ended up with the notorious perfectionist re-recording the vocals and adding some taiko drums to highlight its minimal beat, imitating a heart pounding; posting it again afterwards for general approval. Not happy with that, he later went the Radiohead way, making six different stems (vocals, drums, piano, etc.) available for fans to remix the song themselves.
"Love Lockdown" can be seen as West upgrading himself from rapper to proper soul singer and is one of his more inspired and powerful moments to date. A mind-blowing closing performance at this year's VMAs ignited a chart frenzy all over the world and it looks set to last for a few months.
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