Kanye West Reviews Own Album, Calls It "Great Art"

Kanye West says he's not concerned about whether his new album is a blockbuster, because he's made "great art" — and he feels really good about it.

West's new CD, "808s & Heartbreak," was released Monday. It's a departure for the 31-year-old rapper because it mostly features him singing.

West says he was ready to take a risk and he thinks it paid off.

If you believe Kanye West’s own hype about his new album, 808s and Heartbreak, he hasn’t just turned away from hip hop. He has invented a new genre of music.

He calls it “pop art,” offering no apologies to the likes of Andy Warhol. As West told the Irish Times last week, it’s “not to be confused with the visual art movement.” Rather, he’s making pop music “in an artistic way.”

But what exactly does this mean? The rotoscoped images of Warhol’s soup cans in the video for West’s new song, Heartless, suggest there may be more of a connection between the two “pop arts” than the MC-producer-entrepreneur will admit.

Warhol once said that to learn everything about him, one had to “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”