Hip-hop is over for me, says Kanye

In an overheated hotel room, Kanye West gives a little introductory speech about his latest album, 808s & Heartbreak, before taking an iPod out of his pocket and plugging it into a speaker.

At regular intervals as the album plays, he does a dance - still seated - to the strange new sounds coming from the iPod. Instead of the hip-hop with which he made his name, the new album mixes a kind of science-fiction synth-pop with an R&B undertow. It sounds like Michael Jackson fronting the Human League in Studio 54.

West is one of the biggest and most interesting artists in music today. It is not an overestimation to regard his second album, Late Registration, as rap's White Album. He is extravagantly talented - and he knows it. Modesty is not his strong suit: when he lost out on an MTV award two years ago, he interrupted the speech of winners Justice Vs Simian to shout out: "This award should have gone to me!" He once posed as Jesus Christ on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

Other times, he makes better use of his public profile. He deviated from a speech he was giving at a Hurricane Katrina benefit to declare on live TV that "George Bush doesn't care about black people". He is also one of the few artists to speak out about rampant homophobia in the rap world.

There are only two things he doesn't want to talk about today: the death of his mother last year and the recent end of his 18-month engagement to the designer Alexis Phifer. There's one other proviso: "If you ask me which do I prefer - producing or singing? - I will walk straight out of this room."

He smiles as he says this. Or at least, his mouth is smiling. His eyes aren't.

The emotional backdrop to the latest album is bereavement and romantic grief: most of the 11 tracks are about West's break-up with Phifer, while one, Coldest Winter, is an elegy for his mother, Donda West, an academic who raised him alone after her marriage broke up when he was three.

West blames himself for her death, which occurred during cosmetic surgery for breast reduction and a "tummy tuck". She had left her job as chairwoman of Chicago State University's English department to be with her son in Los Angeles and he believes she would still be alive if she hadn't made the move to that city. As he puts it: "I lost her to Hollywood."

Today West is in a sombre, workmanlike mood. He casts a baleful look at an assistant who has the temerity to talk during the album playback, but rather sweetly writes a note with the album's track listing for me and whispers clarifications into my ear between tracks.

"The reason why I feel I had to give a little introductory speech before you heard the album is because this is not hip-hop music," he says. "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've had to create a whole new musical genre to describe what I'm doing now and I'm calling it 'pop-art' - which is not to be confused with the visual art movement. I realise that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of a generation."

Outside his native America, West can come across as an unbearable show-off. But at home he represents the voice of a confident black middle class that will assert their self-belief in blunt terms. His ego may be the size of Illinois but he has the sales figures to match. He's a 10-time Grammy winner whose four previous albums have tallied 12 million sales worldwide. As a producer he has sprinkled his magic over works by Jay-Z, Beyonce and Janet Jackson.

The most immediately striking thing about the new album is the use of a software package called Auto-Tune on all but one of the 11 tracks.

Auto-Tune - used in much of today's pop music - corrects the pitch in a singer's voice but also gives it a slightly distorted, robotic feel (not too dissimilar to how Cher sounded on her big 1998 hit Believe).

"I wanted to use Auto-Tune to distance myself from that traditional rap sound," he says. "I've already braced myself for the critical reaction to it. The other really different thing here is that there are no natural drum sounds on the album.

"I've called the album 808s & Heartbreak because all the drum sounds are made by the Roland TR-808 drum machine which was really big in the 1980s. Most drum machines use samples of real human drumming but the Roland doesn't so you've got that MTV-in-the-1980s feel throughout the whole album."

Before arriving at his new sound, West trawled all the pop music he had grown up with.

"I was listening to the stuff that really excited me when I was a kid. It was Boy George and Madonna and Michael Jackson and Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. I completely subscribe to popular culture."

He disdains what he calls the snobbery of people who think if something is popular "then it's necessarily bullshit".

"Look at all those indie guitar bands who look down on pop music. My question to them is: 'Do you not want a song of yours to explode and be heard by everyone?' Look at Britney Spears and how people talk about her.

"If you don't like Britney Spears, then you're just wrong."

Telegraph, London

808s & Heartbreak is out now. Kanye West performs at the Acer Arena on Saturday.