Kanye West takes on pop culture in its myriad forms with his new album 808s and Heartache. (Universal Music Canada)

“Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in …”

– Patrick Bateman, in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho

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.

Looking at West’s recent work is like staring into a hall of mirrors, where the surfaces gleam but the depth is hard to gauge.

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.” Despite his vaunted ego, West has always displayed an introspective side – he skewered his own celebrity with the 2007 single Can’t Tell Me Nothing.

Looking at West’s recent work is like staring into a hall of mirrors, where the surfaces gleam but the depth is hard to gauge. Has his switch from hip hop to “pop art” sparked a change from being reflective to simply reflecting?

The last superstars to reinvent themselves as purveyors of arty pop were U2, who boasted of “chopping down the Joshua Tree” in the 1990s, trading in their earnest anthemic rock for a hipper, dance-influenced sound. Bono sang about sliding “down the surface of things,” and on the PopMart tour in 1997-98, the band projected huge images of art by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other pop artists on giant video screens.

All the while, they were performing a difficult balancing act, critiquing the pop culture they embraced. Their 1991 song Even Better Than the Real Thing, for instance, owed as much to cultural critic Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum (where an image comes to replace the thing that it represents) as it did to Coca-Cola advertisements.

(Universal Music Canada) With 808s and Heartbreak, Kanye’s stated aim is simply to embrace the fact that, as he told the Irish Times, he is “a huge fan of popular culture.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in his video for Love Lockdown, which copies the design of Patrick Bateman’s apartment in the film adaptation of American Psycho. He has said that he admired “the clean esthetic and the way [Bateman] was all about [designer] labels. I wanted to express all of that in the video.” Never mind the film’s caustic critique of materialism. For West, the branding is paramount.

While the psychotic Bateman lectures prostitutes on the greatness of Phil Collins before having sex to Sussudio, West makes music that harks back to Collins’s '80s solo work, with its booming drums and prominent synths. This mid-'80s sound has been explored in recent years by everyone from Nelly Furtado to Keane, M83 and The Week That Was; Kanye’s wrinkle is his prominent use of Auto-Tune. The software program, popularized by r’n’b/hip-hop sidekick-for-hire T-Pain, creates an unnatural perfection. Instead of sliding from one note to the next, the singer hits them all dead-on, as if playing a series of notes on a keyboard. Often, it sounds as if Kanye himself is just another synthesizer.

West’s obsession with all things synthetic doesn’t stop there – the album cover features a deflated balloon in the shape of a Valentine’s Day heart. And the title itself refers to the Roland TR-808, a classic drum machine whose signature programmed sounds provide audio branding on nearly every song here. Then there’s Kanye’s recent suit-jacketed, oversize-spectacled image makeover in the style of Trevor Horn from early-'80s electro-pop band the Buggles, a duo so preoccupied with all things synthetic that they called their first album The Age of Plastic. The constant references to references and homages to images threaten to submerge West’s personality, Tron -like, into the endlessly refracting pop culture that he celebrates.

At times, this tension is productive, and his technique resembles that of Takashi Murakami, who designed the artwork for West’s album Graduation last year. The Japanese artist’s Pop Art-informed concept of “superflat” is about rejecting traditional Western perspective to introduce what he calls a “multiplicity of points,” promoting anarchy and diversity.

Kanye West performs during the 2008 Essence Music Festival in New Orleans. (Sean Gardner/Getty Images)The best moments on 808s and Heartbreak do the same thing in music, as in the song Robocop, where all of its elements appear to work at cross-purposes. West speeds up a segment of Kissing in the Rain, a shiveringly emotional orchestral piece from Patrick Doyle’s soundtrack to the 1998 film Great Expectations. Over this loop, he sings lyrics decrying romantic surveillance and asks his lover, “When did you become a Robocop?” with a distorted, Auto-Tuned sound that suggests he might be a robot himself. In the outro, young Cleveland singer Kid Cudi wistfully disses a “little L.A. girl.” Somehow the multiple perspectives form an excitingly disorienting whole, like an inspired mash-up.

But this strategy can also flatten out the emotional heft West attempts to dredge out on songs about heartbreak, with titles such as Coldest Winter and Bad News. Only on the album’s hidden bonus track, Pinocchio, does the “real” Kanye West stand up. It’s a freestyle piece recorded in Singapore, in which he drops the Auto-Tune and pours his heart out about the perils of two-dimensionality: “I turn on the TV and see me and see nothing.” He wants, like the wooden (and fictional) Pinocchio, to be a “real boy,” but it’s unclear how he’ll manage this if he keeps sliding down the surface of things.

In crafting 808s and Heartbreak, West says, he decided to pick “out the coolest shit for my album like I would pick an outfit.” Meanwhile, he stuffs his blog with images of art works, clothes, consumer products, and even advertising campaigns, which he apparently rates as being “extra fly.” While he aims to lead his flock of fans as a cultural curator or tastemaker, he sometimes comes across as merely a dedicated follower of fashion, with statements such as: “Here's all you need to know about my tastes: whatever is the biggest-selling movie in any given year is also my favourite movie of the year.”

Even the resolutely superficial Warhol was constantly baiting both the art establishment and the media, biting the hands that fed him with his aphoristic statements and his art. Kanye West’s own musical pop art flattens out this critique.

Ironically, contemporary pop culture’s greatest ego is too respectful. If he is determined to “go down as the voice of this generation,” as he insists, like “those musicians you see in those old black-and-white photos” that he reveres, maybe he should start by tearing those photographs up.

808s and Heartbreak is in stores now.

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.