Here is Townie's take on the album (he's writing a few pieces in anticipation of launching a blog):
Kanye West and Jay-Z make quite a team.
Jay is more mature, more laid back, more proud than confident, and ultimately, one of hip-hop’s strongest living elder statesmen. After the Blue Album, he was self-proclaimed “rap’s Grateful Dead,” but described by others (probably more accurately) to be the next Biggie. It was a patient, calculated, brilliant time to be Jay. Then, his Michael Jordan-like “retirement” has produced a mix of hatred from others, mediocrity from himself, and dashes of musical brilliance, reflected strongly in his last two releases. His previous solo effort was pop, maximalist, overdone, and full of overly catchy tracks that wore out quickly on the radio waves (a place they were gleefully unwelcome earlier in his career). The sound created a new audience for his music, a bandwagon of new hip-hop fans who were unfamiliar with the underground, with independent or minimalist, freestyle (basically anything out of mainstream) hip-hop. They fostered popularity of a completely different animal that Jay-Z did not achieve during the brightest lyrical/productive spots in his career.
Kanye West has had an even stranger arc. His ambivalence towards his own rep and cred was so great, he often vacillated lyrically and in collaboration. He went from The College Dropout to Graduation, apparently earning his honorary degree from the Daft Punk school of production arts. Every album, he lost a bit of the magic of his early years that came from people doubting him and hating him (though there was a sharp spike in the pre-’10 years with Taylor Swift and George Bush). He was growing in appeal, popularity, recognition, and fame. Then he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and I must say, he did a good ass job. Was it the best album of 2010? Was it Kanye West’s best album? I’ll leave that open for judgment, and only say while that I think All of the Lights is the 21st Century high water mark in hip-hop, the expectations and praise surrounding MBDTF created a toxic atmosphere for the future of GOOD Music and for the forthcoming Watch the Throne.
If you’re black or white or from a culture or background of any kind, it’s really irrelevant (well, race isn’t irrelevant, but we’ll get to that) to argue how different people perceive music. There just seems to be no shades of gray when it comes to both of these artists, and much of a take-it-or-leave it attitude towards their music. But their checkered, nuanced pasts deserve a deeper reading of their current work.
Knowing what I knew about these two, I saw a seemingly endless amount of chemistry: a friendship that was more like a kinship. But I am not so sure it’s big brother-little brother any more. There is no second fiddle on Watch the Throne (which begs the question of who gets to be King). The bold attempt at recalling an earlier trope in hip-hop was in the duo style (though clearly there have been many successful duos in the past few decades). However, on Watch the Throne, the call and response is more pastiche than collaboration.
Enough context, let’s talk about the music, about the way it sounds, about the lyrics, and their themes, and about what this record accomplishes, and where it falls short.
There’s hype, there’s swag, and then there’s Frank Ocean’s contemplative introduction to this album. It falls somewhere between Nikki Minaj’s fantastical introduction to MBDTF and a futurist manifesto. The song continues magnificently through a strange mix of colorful auto-tune, fluttering jungle sounds, and minimal brushes on cymbals. The bass line chases the brief bars around the refrain with interspersed shrieks from Uncle Charlie and the erstwhile synths. I have no idea how to think about this song. It’s the most lyrically confusing, compositionally chaotic song I've heard in a long time. And then there’s that outro that makes me think this shit is once again the soundtrack into some tripped out superego. Only this time, I’m not sure whose.
I surely have no idea what the intended effect of “Lift Off” was, but it was completely lost on me. Beyonce stifles her operatic voice, and it portends to actually introduce the album, but it really takes it back a step lyrically and thematically. Then the self-reflexive stunting comes back for Kanye, and his bars are too short, too far apart, and too drowned out by the machine-gun synth and snare. The auto-tuned vocal interludes function neither instrumentally, harmonically, nor lyrically, and Jay comes on and literally sounds annoyed. I’m not sure if I could dance to this or properly deconstruct it without looking silly. The NASA liftoff countdown would be much more well placed at the end of the track instead of allowing it to meander between the jazzy and natural piano/horns and the swirling, confusing artificial sounds.
Where the album lost steam, it immediately picks back up with “Ni**as in Paris.” Finally there’s a beat both heroes can step up and murder. On top of the brilliance of all the lines in this song, there’s the introduction of the materialism, there’s the first breath of real swagger. There’s comedy and some of the most clever lines of the whole album. The Blades of Glory samples are playful and timely, and then the track just drops out in a sort of dubstep/trip-hip-hopera unlike anything I’ve heard. Then there’s first nod “You are now watching the throne,” and we’ve arrived. I wish it hadn’t taken so long to get here, but now I’m excited.
Most of the division I’ve heard from listeners of this album comes from “Otis.” What it did to destroy a classic, I can’t tell, because to me it seems like yet another classic Kanye sample, honoring a great piece of songwriting, and finally on this record doing something understandable on the turntable. And now we get the second theme (after a sort of half-guilty materialism) of WTT. Well, this song is all swagger and cash, too, but there’s the first hints of “black excellence” we heard about in some of the MBDTF outtakes. And rather than take it track to track from here going through the rest of the album (the best tracks are in the second half), I will stop at the crux of where these two, two of rap’s current best, seem to have landed. It’s a collage of bravado and complacency. Lest we forget, 'Ye once lamented about “a white man getting paid off all of that.” But this is his label now, his sound, and one of the best colleagues anyone could ask for in support.
When we get past a few digs at white assassinations of character, there is, in my mind, the best track of the album and one of the best in the genre (I’m not talking about this year). “Made in America” gets a soul-stroking treatment from Frank Ocean, and a muted, slow instrumental track to guide everything along.
“Sweet King Martin [Luther King, Jr.], sweet Queen Coretta [Scott King] / Sweet brother Malcolm [X], sweet Queen Betty [Shabazz] / Sweet Mother Mary, sweet father Joseph / Sweet Jesus, we made it in America / Sweet Baby Jesus.”
It’s an inspiring song. It’s patriotic and proud, it social and political, and it’s a new national anthem. Whatever you feel about the song, the album, the duo, this is a triumph. Not in an R Kelly “Made it/World’s greatest” sense, or by means of success (by money or records sold), but in something actually, metaphysically greater.
I stop there, because although I think there are plenty more triumphs and misfortunes on the record worth chronicling, I think that at worst, the two have achieved another creative turn in the genre iconoclasm. At best, I think they have finally tempered people’s expectations for what can be done at the top of the mainstream; emotions are here to stay in rap, alongside conscience, self-reflection/deprecation, but the game hasn’t changed.
“This ain’t no fashion show motherfucker, we live it.”
