Well I wouldn’t actually call it a flop, as Kanye West’s new album, 808’s and Heartbreak, sold an estimated 450,000 copies in it’s first week, but for Kanye, it’s a 50% decrease from his last album.
Good thing he doesn’t care about sales, right?
West’s last album, Graduation, sold 957,000 copies in it’s first week back in September of 2007, but Kanye’s musical direction has made a drastic change over the past year.
This is something West fans are going to have to get used to though, as he said while taking questions following a CD listening party, “Taking a sample, looping it and doing all that ‘throw your hands up in the sky’ thing has become such a cliche. Hip-hop is over for me. I sing, not rap, on this album. I now want to be grouped among those musicians you see in those old black-and-white photos – the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles. And I’m not going to get there by doing just another rap album full of samples.”
I gotta say now, this new style of Kanye which he labels “pop art” is his best work yet.
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