A car accident in October 2002 left Kanye West with a broken jaw and a need to triumph against all odds. The video above explores West's transition from being a producer to a rapper against this backdrop.
West's first single, Through the Wire, came out in 2004 after the accident. He recorded the song with his jaw wired shut, paving the way for a completely different kind of hip-hop music.
Traditionally, crisp vocals have been an unwritten rule in every kind of popular music. West chose to consciously step away from that convention.
West’s style is deconstructed here and intricate details examined. For instance, his song Runaway, from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, includes a six-minute segment which sees him experimenting with a vocoder – an instrument whose synthesised sounds comes by analysing vocal inputs. It lets his voice sound like a distorted electric guitar, adding significantly and unexpectedly to the overall effect.
From allowing the raw quality of the human voice to take over the entire song to processing vocals to the point where you can’t recognise them easily, West has chosen to explore extremes by manipulating vocals in his songs.
He even famously got Pulitzer-Prize winning vocalist Caroline Shaw on board for a re-release of Say You Will, allowing the vocals to overflow. She accompanies him in a few tracks in his latest album, The Life of Pablo, which even includes a choir in Ultralight Beam.
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