Album of the Year. This should be album of the year. Watch the throne. Seated, two Kings of hip-hop. Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter from Marcy, Brooklyn, New York. Kanye West native of Atlanta, Georgia, raised in Chicago, Illinois. This is a collaborative album, Kanye West's first historical and Hova's fourth after the two with R. Kelly and seven years later the project with Linkin Park. West and Jay-Z have collaborated on several songs and singles in the past, Kanye has often produced songs by Jay including those featured on his last seven solo albums, i.e. all since their artistic collaboration was born in 2000, while the New York rapper guested on four of West's five albums (he's uncredited on "Graduation"). After the success of the remix of West's song "Power" (with Jay-Z) to promote "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy", the idea of an effort between the two artists was born. Originally the collaborative project began as a short EP of five songs, then extended to a full album. West's track "Monster" is also destined for the EP, but ultimately ends up on one of the best hip-hop records ever, while some tracks recorded for that album end in this, like "The Joy" and "That's My Bitch", while others, intended for this collaborative LP, end in Hova's future solo album after Jay-Z's strong insistence that he must convince a stubborn West.
Production features Kanye West, 88-Keys, Mike Dean, Om'Mas Keith, Jeff Bhasker, Q-Tip, Pharrell Williams, Don Jazzy, Anthony Kilhoffer, The Neptunes, RZA, Hit-Boy, Ken Lewis, Swizz Beatz , Sak Pase, S1, Pete Rock, South Side, Lex Luger and No ID. Credited guests are Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, The-Dream, Mr. Hudson, Otis Redding and Curtis Mayfield.
Commercial boom bap pop-oriented that sounds powerful thanks to heavy and boost bass, opening hook by Frank Ocean that opens the record: it's Beyoncé who convinces Jay to bring the singer to the album after the success of his recent mixtape. Good entry by Hova delivering energetic, determined and inspired. Unfortunately, there's a hook with autotune that sounds unnecessary. Kanye is decent. The lyrics leave the time they find. The song produced by West, 88-Keys and Mike Dean is seasoned with a sample of "Tristessa", by the Italian group Orchestra Njervudarov, present in many other songs.
2. "Lift Off" (ft. Beyonce)
Complex and modern jazzy boom bap, tight, with a good opening hook from Beyoncé. Solid production by West, Mike Dean and Jeff Bhasker along with Q-Tip, Pharrell and Don Jazzy. There are several artists credited as additional vocals, the track is pop-oriented and also features strings, horns, drums and synthesizers. West is good at rapping, Jay isn't surprising.
3. "Niggas in Paris"
This is one of the most appreciated songs by fans. It sucks. Badly digitized boom bap, bouncy, aggressive and simplistic, industrial-inspired, born for the club. The production by West, Hit-Boy, Mike Dean and Anthony Kilhoffer is laughable. Carter and West engage in pouring out lines about materialism, wealth and bravado for nearly four minutes but the beat ruins it, it's awful. There's a good dirty jazzy bridge at the end of the song, but it fails to save the track.
4. "Otis" (ft. Otis Redding)
Soulful sample looped from an Otis Redding song, nice loop that recalls the early era of Kanye West's production based on chipmunk soul. Then the producer decides to completely screw up the rhythm with Otis's own sample looped in a tight and annoying way, which doesn't work on this tight and essential soulful jazz rhythm. Better Kanye than Jay here. The final screaming is completely annoying, why include it? It doesn't make sense.
5. "Gotta Have It"
The Neptunes arrive to help West behind the keyboards, minimal and syncopated soulful jazzy boom bap, with sample looped in a very tight and annoying way, shrill sound. The two rappers also deliver here, leaving nothing memorable.
6. "New Day"
Hook with autotune, never needed. Kanye on the first verse accompanied by the sample of Nina Simone's classic "Feeling Good" with autotune looped in the background, it sounds awful honestly. The two rappers randomly spit on it, but the production, credited to West, RZA, Mike Dean and Ken Lewis, is awful. Forgettable lyricism, as usual, the boys discuss their future as fathers. This is one of the worst songs on the album musically.
7. "That's My Bitch"
Poorly synthesized/digitized, annoying, narrow, simplistic, skeletal jazzy boom bap. Kanye is fine, Jay-Z is fine, there's a great hook from Connie Mitchell that elevates this track beyond decency, good reggae bridge after hook.
8. "Welcome to the Jungle"
The track evidently steals the title from a Guns n' Roses classic. Swizz Beatz heavy, funky, skeletal, bouncy boom bap, the two boys deliver worthily, Hova makes a more personal cut than the others, then Swizz delivers in autotune.
9. "Who Gon Stop Me"
Kanye goes to sample "I Can't Stop", the hit by Flux Pavillon, fantastic. Brilliant sample, great rap by West and Jay-Z, here both inspired by a great modern, experimental and tight boom bap, with good bass and heavy synths, which mixes with the sample of the EDM song. Kanye West better than Hova with great flow, slow, crisp, smooth, awesome delivery.
10. "Murder to Excellence"
Very good boom bap light, rhythmic and modern, it's curious that such a good beat came out of the hands of Swizz Beatz, I tend to give props to S1, who is best known for producing quality productions and is a name that stood out for the beats on Kanye West's latest solo album. Kid Cudi good on the rnb hook, great deliveries from Jay and West. Another excellent track that raises the record in the second part, addressing crime among blacks and black-on-black violence.
11. "Made in America" (ft. Frank Ocean)
Gorgeous light, glossy, modern, clean, patina boom bap, great track by Sak Pase and Mike Dean. The two emcees are good at rapping, lyrics revolving around family life and the American dream, as the two discuss their respective rise to fame, good hook by Frank Ocean.
12. "Because I Love You" (ft. Mr Hudson)
Heavy, hard, modern, layered boom bap made by Mike Dean, West and Anthony Kilhoffer. Kanye is good at rap, Jay sounds better, inspired, flowing, dope. Mr Hudson's pop hook backed by a female chorus. Acceptable and accessible pop piece that closes the original collaborative record.
Bonus Tracks
13. "Illest Motherfucker Alive"
The boys play pretty good on a tight, skeletal, dark, modern boom bap made by West, Mike Dean and Southside.
14. "H•A•M"
Released in January 2011 as the album's first promotional single, the track received a cold reception from the public: is the worst-performing single released by Kanye in the last three years, and it's also one of the worst for Jay-Z's catalog in the past two years, chart-wise. This convinces the guys to change the entire record production log of the album, moving it from an experimental trap hardcore sound to a safer sound related to Jazz, a genre that for Kanye West was dead, as he told Statik Selektah just a year earlier in Hawaii while recording his record with an outstanding team of producers. Lex Luger, former producer for Waka Flocka Flame and Soulja Boy (friend of West), does not touch anything more for this project.
The track is dropped from the disc due to the lukewarm response from the audience and is included as a bonus track only, risking not ending up there either. Dark, frantic, deep and complex trap beat by Luger, West and Mike Dean, both West and Jay spit bars in a focused and energetic way, but the beat sucks too much and ends up drowning out the rap of the two, playing over it. There's an interesting opera-gospel bridge on the hook that is clearly inspired by Queen. Track too ambitious to be adequately appreciated by the general public, who in fact snubs it and convinces the two to change the direction of the album. Jay-Z wouldn't even want to release it as the first single off the record, however, he has to give in and in the end he was right.
15. "Prime Time"
Beautiful tight and complex rhythm with a good sound, Jay is at home here, while West fits well, it's a good piece.
16. "The Joy" (ft. Curtis Mayfield)
Curtis Mayfield is credited on the last bonus track of the Kanye West and Jay-Z collaborative record. Good skeletal funky boom bap from Pete Rock, Kanye West, Lex Luger, Mike Dean and Jeff Bhasker, Mayfield and Syl Johnson samples from his most sampled track ever, light soul hook.
Final Thoughts
Released by Roc-A-Fella Records, Roc Nation and Def Jam Recordings, Jay-Z and Kanye West's respective record labels, the album is distributed by Universal. First in USA — twelfth in a row for Shawn Carter, fifth in a row for West —, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, and in the urban charts of Australia and the UK, it's one of the best-selling albums of the year and of the decade in its homeland, collecting platinum on three continents. The record achieves critical acclaim with generally positive but rarely laudatory reviews, and is approved by the record industry, which awards him a Grammy 2011 with "Otis" winning Best Rap Performance — with this success, West becomes the rapper with the most wins in the history of the Grammys, and the boy is still complaining about not winning the prizes organized by his neighborhood — losing Best Rap Song to Kanye West's "All of the Lights" from the 2010 album, and at the 2012 Grammys with "Niggas in Paris" winning Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance and "No Church in the Wild" winning Best Rap/Sung Collaboration.
The album was nominated for Best Rap Album at the 2011 Grammys, losing to Kanye's solo album. Seven singles are released, all of which have their own music video and are highly to modestly commercially successful: notably "Niggas in Paris" returns Jay-Z to the number one rnb singles spot after two years, and West after six, while "Lift Off" and "Because I Love You" are the third and fourth singles respectively from an album by Kanye West not to enter the American charts, as well as being the first singles from a Jay-Z album not to enter the US charts since 2000. The promotional tour undertaken by the two rappers became the highest-grossing hip-hop concert tour in history.
Jay-Z approached the collaborative project wanting to make a grand album in the vein of "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" with layered and musically complex songs. Kanye West wants to go back to experimenting like in "808s", while Jay wants to continue in the direction of his latest albums and play it safe with a Jazz imprint, a genre that West refers to as having died in Statik Selektah a year earlier, when the Boston producer had been called along with many others to Hawaii for West's previous album sessions. The album is recorded between Hawaii, Sydney, New York, Paris, England, Abu Dhabi and Los Angeles, often made in hotel rooms, this is because West decided to leave Hawaii following a leak that one of the songs from his latest album had suffered. Recording the disc in hotel rooms, Kanye West achieves the goal that he had set for the album: this is one of the few major albums in the internet age to avoid leaks.
This project increases the ambition of Kanye West's latest album, which was highly praised by critics and audiences and hailed as a blessing for hip-hop, and adds orchestral and progressive rock influences, experimental melodies and atypical samples. West maintains the production team that was part of the massive success of his latest iconic album, excluding No ID, that he's already figured out how he's going to turn out this LP, he's going to sell, but it won't be like West's best records or Hova's best records. The lyricism revolves around the celebrity culture already featured on that same West record, to which socio-economic and political critiques are added, rare forays into the socio-conscious and topics such as success, power, problems, materialism and bragging, the success of the two artists in industry, West's reflections on his social esteem and Jay-Z's reflections on being a father.
The project should flow like oil as it's made between two artists who have often collaborated with each other for over a decade and who know each other, nevertheless, differences emerge on the musical direction that this project should take. Jay-Z wants to go one way, Kanye West is headed the other way: the two distance themselves several times from the collaborative project, which is interrupted lots of times before being completed, also because Jay-Z wants the album to be recorded in the studio, while Kanye prefers to record his verses on the phone and then send them via e-mail to Jay.
Relations between the two begin to fray. After this effort, for the first time after thirteen years, Jay-Z doesn't even use a West beat for his new solo album, "Magna Carta... Holy Grail", while Kanye, who has guested Hova on four of his five albums thus far, decides not to use his collaboration for his next solo album, "Yeezus". The problems actually go back upstream, during the simultaneous recording of West's "808s" and Jay's "Blueprint 3": when the New York rapper releases "Run This Town" as a single, Kanye isn't convinced of the goodness of the product, of which he's both producer and guest, because he played it at a barbecue and the reaction of those present wasn't what West wanted. The piece will then be a global success and will get two Grammys.
This collaborative LP isn't a good project, from every point of view: the product is inconsistent, boring and generic, decent at times, often shoddy, middling pop-rap effort that's never memorable and is an obvious faux pas for both. The production is overly heavy and messy, often flat, limp, awkward when it has too many layers, and forced when it tries to experiment. The lyrics are quite generic, mostly wealth, party and braggadocio, the boys talk about their life of luxury by delivering simple and skippable bars on excesses, materialism, power, fame, the burdens of success and a few truly sensible thoughts. The two rappers ain't trying, they ain't even trying, they ain't at their best, are almost detached from their own album and do their homework, they enjoy with an easy rapping, for them this is a style exercise during which Jay-Z travels on autopilot with an average and disappointing style, while Kanye West has just lost his car and sounds lazy, bland, hardly ever good. The record is almost a kind of self-celebration for both even if they celebrate different things, Jay-Z jumps on the bandwagon of Kanye's recent masterpiece and cheers with him perhaps to reaffirm that he was the one who discovered him and that it's actually thanks to him that you have that record, Kanye West could only get off after the resounding success of that record and here he's saying practically nothing and he's just celebrating being a friend of Jay-Z, which must be a great thing if the kid decides to make a whole album out of it.
Rating: 5/10.
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