Content Analysis: “808s & Heartbreak”
Recently, I completed a content analysis of Kanye West’s fourth album 808s & Heartbreak. I do not know much about the record, but I can come to a logical conclusion — based on the name of the album, the cover art, and some of the songs’ titles (“Welcome to Heartbreak”) — that the album is about heartbreak.
Content Analysis
Using the text analysis program Voyant, I imported the album’s lyrics and let the program do its magic.
Cirrus
Voyant’s Cirrus is a word cloud that displays the frequency of words that appear in a text — the words that occur more frequently appear larger on the graph. The Cirrus map helped show me the most common words on 808s:
Trends
The program’s trends graph is a line graph displaying the locations of the five most used words throughout 808s:
By analyzing these two graphs, I see which words are used most frequently (know, I’m, love, just, and hey), and where these words appear on the album and in relation to each other. After interpreting this data, I decided to focus on two particular words that stood out to me: love and cold.
Love
The word love means an intense feeling of deep affection. According to the graph, love is used 46 times throughout the album, but particularly in the beginning/middle and end parts — where the two large trends on the graph are visible. Based on the fact that love appears so frequently on the album, I believe love is a theme of 808s.
Cold
Even though cold is used only nine times on 808s, the graph shows that it is used regularly throughout the album — it is used more consistently than love. The word cold has several implications — sadness, unemotional, low temperature, depression, death — and because of its frequency throughout the graph, I believe cold is a common theme.
Additionally, I found three words with valuable data but appeared less frequently in the album: wrong, worry, and lose.
Wrong implies incorrectness or unjustness, worry suggests concern, and lose indicates deprivation or defeat. What’s most interesting about these words is that they all are used during one part of the album (hence the flux in the graph towards segments 3–6) and are rarely seen in other regions of the chart. This tells me that certain songs may contain more depressing messages than other songs.
Ultimately, looking at these charts helped me to decipher possible themes, such as love and coldness; the patterns of the graphs tell me that certain themes may only be present in specific songs, rather than the entire album. These graphs communicate the possible meanings and messages of 808s & Heartbreak, and allowed me to become aware of certain reoccurring lyrics.
After hearing 808s & Heartbreak
After listening to 808s & Heartbreak, I understood the album in an entirely different way. If I had just completed a content analysis and not listened to the record, I would not know that the album primarily consists of electronic sounds and auto-tune — unlike Kanye’s previous records which feature typical rap beats. Also, Kanye consistently uses a drum sound — known as TR-808 — to make unique, yet distorted, beats in the songs. I found that listening to 808s’ songs, rather than just analyzing the lyrics, provided a more comprehensive and vivid understanding of the album, particularly because the use of synthesized sounds, auto-tune, and drum beats conveyed messages that the lyrics could not.
For instance, in “Say You Will,” the last two minutes and 30 seconds of the song consist primarily of sounds, not lyrics — specifically a repeated drum sequence, random electronic beeps, and distant choir vocals. Although there are no lyrics during this part of the song, Kanye uses the sounds to convey the themes of heartbreak and desolation. The impact of these sounds goes beyond words or lyrics, which is why if I had only analyzed the album using Voyant, I would have missed an opportunity to interpret significant elements from 808s.
Also, after listening to 808s, I discovered other themes that were not apparent just by looking at the lyrics. The majority of the album is about heartbreak, which I concluded before the content analysis; however, listening to it also taught me that 808s is equally about alienation and losing a loved one.
In the cold trend chart above, I noted that I believed coldness would be a theme; but after listening to the album, specifically the song “Coldest Winter,” I realized that cold refers to Kanye feeling as though he has lost himself. In the song, he indirectly talks about his mother passing away and his ex girlfriend; he is cold from the loss of those he once loved, so cold is a metaphor for his heartbreak. While the text analysis showed me that cold could be a theme, listening to the album helped me to understand what coldness truly means: it represents Kanye’s loss and loneliness. Textual analysis on its own would not be able to come to this conclusion.
Similarly, the auditory elements of “Bad News” are more significant than the song’s lyrics. The first two minutes of the track feature Kanye with heavily auto-tuned vocals, strange electronic noises, piano notes, and distanced drumming. The song then becomes fully instrumental — no lyrics, just the beat of the main melody from drums and electronic beats. The last 30 seconds consists solely of the noise of a beating drum, mirroring the sounds of a heartbeat; the song ends with an uncanny “flatline” of this beat, which makes the listener feel alienated, just as the lyrics suggest Kanye is. Because the majority of the song is composed of sounds, rather than lyrics, the beats convey moods and emotions, instead of messages. The sounds evoke feelings of gloominess, desolation, and regret; also, components, such as the heartbeat, allow the listener to place oneself in Kanye’s shoes. The textual analysis could not communicate such emotions — only the auditory elements of “Bad News” allow the listener to understand and feel like Kanye, and thus interpret the album through Kanye’s eyes.
Overall
Completing a content analysis of 808s & Heartbreak taught me that the process can be both beneficial and limiting. The initial content analysis helped bring to light certain lyrical trends that I would not have picked up on, however, the content analysis program lacked the capability to conceptualize the text and convey any significance; it took words out of context to make sense of meaning, such as frequency, but not of value, such as what Kanye is trying to express in a lyric. Using Voyant was helpful in providing a general outline of what the album would be like, but I felt that I needed to listen to 808s in order to fully grasp Kanye’s message and form a complete interpretation.
Ultimately, if I had not listened to the album and just used Voyant, I would not understand what the album actually sounded like, and thus how the sounds contributed to my experience of the album. The lyrics themselves express themes of sadness, anger, relationships, etc., but the auditory components of the record actually conveyed the depressive, lonely, heartbreaking elements of the album. If these lyrics were to be paired with fast pasted, upbeat music, the album could be interpreted as cheerful, fun, and exciting. But the distinct tempo of 808s is what makes the album so unique—it would be difficult to differentiate the 808s’s lyrics from any other Kanye record, but when taking the lyrics and the unconventional sounds into account, it’s evident that 808 is unlike any of Kanye’s other works. In the album, Kanye used audio to express the feelings he could not pen in his lyrics — therefore, it’s essential to both analyze the lyrics and listen to the record to completely understand 808s and Heartbreak.
