Artist: Of Montreal
Album: Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Year: 2007
Hissing Fauna is probably the most bizarre and confusing breakup album I’ve talked about this week. Much of this comes from the fact that it’s not exactly a true breakup album. Instead, it chronicles a type of “imaginary breakup” in the mind of band leader Kevin Barnes. Although he was certainly going through a rough patch with his wife Nina at the time of recording, Barnes hides a lot of his autobiographical lyrics behind a Ziggy Stardust-like persona, which he dubbed Georgie Fruit. The album’s songs tell the story of a shattering relationship, brought up by the narrator’s mental chemical imbalance, eventually creating a schism, separating the Georgie Fruit persona from Barnes (or so we assume). By using Georgie Fruit as his stand-in, Barnes becomes a fairly unreliable narrator; some details are probably truly inspired by his marital problems but others are complete fiction. However, quibbling about autobiographical details aside, the album succeeds at conjuring up a hyperactive, colorful, schizophrenic representation of the emotions associated with breaking up. The first words spoken on the album are “we just want to emote ‘till we’re dead,” delivered with Barnes’s trademark cheek. The highlights are unrelenting after that, ranging from “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse”, a glorious send up to being chemically dependent, to “She’s A Rejecter”, which lurches all over the place as the Georgie Fruit ego (or is it Barnes? We don’t know! Ahhh!) lashes out at “the girl that left me bitter.” Strangest of all is the twelve-minute epic “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal”, which sounds like the most personal expression of heartache and frustration on the album. As Barnes explains it, it’s during this song that he is transformed into Georgie and, listening to the song, you can hear the story being told. “We want our movie to be beautiful, not realistic,” is his appraisal of the relationship as a whole. Whether this is true or not, whether we’re listening to Barnes or Georgie, it’s a fantastic song about the problems that tear relationships apart.
Artist: Kanye West
Album: 808s And Heartbreak
Year: 2008
In 2006, I saw Kanye live in Seattle. This was a year after Late Registration came out and he was on top of the fucking world. He was so impossibly confident, swaggering around and soaking in the attention, that he seemed almost unbearably egotistic. He seemed totally untouchable. Fast forward to the 2008 Grammy Awards. His mother Donda had just died from complications surrounding plastic surgery. He’d been plagued with unrelenting media attention which blew everything he said (most of which were, admittedly, crazy) way out of proportion. Here he was, performing two songs at the Grammys and his transformation on stage was terrifying. Instead of the buoyant confidence I saw two years earlier, he was intense and jerky, channeling all his energy into the floor with a vicious stomp. He sneered the lyrics at the crowd, before abruptly changing moods for a spectral version of “Mama” in tribute. He was a completely different creature. When 808s came out at the end of that year, everyone seemed surprised by the shift in artistic direction, but I feel anyone who had really noticed the ways Kanye had changed over the years saw it coming. On 808s, he’s also reeling from a broken engagement and separation from fiancée Alexis Phifer, which creates two different levels of broken love: a romantic one and a filial one. The music is ghostly and minimal, favoring deep bass thuds and icy synth lines slicing through the fog of emotions Kanye is surrounding himself with. Kanye dehumanizes his voice with an AutoTune effect, further isolating himself in a cocoon of loneliness. The bitterness towards Alexis shows in tracks like “Heartless”, while the loss of his mother can be heard in the resigned weariness of “Street Lights” or “Coldest Winter”. There are moments of anger on 808s, along with personal sadness and loneliness and all the rest of the usual sentiments on breakup albums, but what comes through the most is grief. 808s is an album of mourning, both for the loss of a relationship and the loss of a mother.
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