On Pinocchio Story, the bonus live track that turns out to be the key to his audaciously introspective fourth album, he freestyles about the character, repeatedly singing, "I want to be a real boy". 808s and Heartbreak, out this week and streaming on MySpace, is a meditation on realness as it's been defined by materialism and machismo in the hip-hop world, and by love and sorrow in the larger one.
Wrought in hushed mechanical beats, computer-altered vocals and samples so subtle they're barely noticeable, it's West's foray into confessional music. But this star's constant craving to be original leads him away from the rawness that characterises such revelations.
On an album that he has said is "about emotional nakedness", West finds his beating, bleeding heart in inanimate objects - the Roland TR-808 drum machine that revolutionised electronic music of the 1980s, and the Antares Auto-Tune pitch-correction software that's such a prevalent tool in today's pop sound. This is high-concept stuff and likely off-putting to the casual listener.
Although several tracks - the oddly peppy Paranoid and Robocop, about a monstrous ex - are danceable, 808s and Heartbreak heavily endorses the rave scene's concept of "chill".
Its mood comes closest to the vaporous electronica of obscure artists such as the Junior Boys and M83.
A Tears for Fears song forms the melodic basis for one track, but West never reaches for the primal release of that band's New Wave classics.
He also resists the impishness so artfully deployed by his friend T-Pain (and his forefather, Zapp's Roger Troutman) in many Auto-Tuned hits.
Instead, West reins in his natural wit and frothiness in search of a more contemplative experience. This in itself already has some fans dismissing 808s and Heartbreak as self-indulgent or even crazy: why would someone so skilled at making smart hit songs tone down his golden touch? And why would a rapper who's not a great singer insist on singing on every track?
The answer, I think, has to do with that underlying Pinocchio story.
As New Yorker pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in his excellent June piece on Auto-Tune, the program has given producers a way to foreground the unnaturalness of the recording process.
Drum machines did something similar 30 years ago, feeding a shift in pop away from a search for authenticity and toward a fascination with technology and the imagined worlds it inspires.
Because they're so obviously "fake," the sounds that come from primitive drum machines and manipulative software force the listener to question what they consider real - regarding not only the sounds they hear but also the emotions they invoke.
Puppets have historically been associated with the same questions Auto-Tune raises now.
They seem to be more human than human and if manipulated well can cause that uncanny feeling of not knowing where an object stops and humanity starts.
"Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god," wrote the German poet and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist in 1810.
Watching the dance of a beautiful marionette, which has no sense of self, we begin to ponder our own self-awareness - the very essence of humanity.
West seeks a similar effect on 808s and Heartbreak, a heavy trip indeed.
West has played with puppet-like personas throughout his career.
He often plays a bear in the artwork and videos by frequent collaborator Takashi Murakami.
The heart pin he's been wearing of late is a direct steal from the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.
And on this album, he connects puppet imagery, one of the oldest routes to pondering the question of real versus fake, with computerised music, one of the newest.
West's obsession on 808s and Heartbreak is grief.
He's trying to express the way it alienates a person from himself and throws a fog around every former pleasure.
The album explicitly confronts the death of West's mother after plastic surgery last northern autumn and his subsequent break-up with long-time companion Alexis Phifer.
Having lost his nurturers, West found himself lonelier and less confident than he knew he could be; this is the soundtrack to his bewilderment.
- Ann Powers
