Jody Rosen on Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak

"With Kanye largely abandoning rapping in favor of digitally altered crooning, his fourth album represents a cultural high-water mark for Auto-Tune, that now ubiquitous pitch-correction technology...Kanye can't really sing in the classic sense, but he's not trying to. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn't just sharpen flat notes: It's a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness, and upping the pathos. In "Bad News," Kanye's digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he's become less than human."