Fascinated by the public response to Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album", mash-up of a cappella version of Jay-Z "The Black Album" and instrumentals from The Beatles' self-titled ninth album, known as "The White Album", MTV plans to create a mashup, or at most two tracks, between Jay-Z and another pop artist. Shawn Carter's choice is the group Linkin Park.
lasting a total of twenty minutes with an additional DVD of a further twenty minutes. The rapper's Roc-A-Fella, via Def Jam, and the rock band's Machine Shop, via Warner Bros. Records, agree to split the profits, because this effort is for profit, it's all profit. Jay-Z and Mike Shinoda re-record six songs in four days.
Linkin Park take singles from "Hybrid Theory" and "Meteora" albums, while Jay-Z pulls singles from four different records ("Vol. 2", "Vol. 3", "The Blueprint" and "The Black Album") to compile this medley EP produced by Mike Shinoda & Shawn Carter. The first effort is "Dirt Off Your Shoulder / Lying from You", cheap boom bap, then heavy hard rock / garage metal beat, first verse to Jay-Z, then aggressive delivery of Linkin Park on third hardcore / hard metal beat. Another medley follows, short, with a single pretty weak production.
The third track has a good, tense, bouncy dark jazzy boom bap, mutating back to trash metal to accommodate the rock band's aggressive delivery. "Numb / Encore" is among the most accessible tunes of this EP, good delivery of Hova and Linkin Park, here less hardcore than usual: this song, chosen as the single of the album, is awarded for best Rap / Sung collaboration at the 2006 Grammy Awards.
Also "Izzo / In the End" has a good rhythm, but the choice is lower than the previous one, so the EP is closed by the sixth track, a medley between two songs by Linkin Park and "99 Problems" by Carter, on rhythms by Linkin Park. There aren't too many excuses for this mess: it's disappointing. The combination of these two types of music here works once for a scant three minutes and wow, it's worth a Grammy, sure, but also a ton of negative reviews.
The album is unanimously panned by specialist critics: Rolling Stone, NME, Entertainment Weekly, Christgau and The Guardian for once all agree, at a time when it was practically illegal to give a negative review to a Jay-Z album (and, in fact, hip-hop magazines don't do it; and they don't do it for his "other" 2004 collaborative album either, this should give you an explanation of the fact that when a few lines ago I wrote that it was illegal to give him a bad review, I wasn't kidding!), but instead, it gets a huge commercial success worldwide, with over three million copies sold, charting first in the US (but not beyond #3 both among R&B albums both among rap ones) and dominating in Europe, where it goes strong: #1 Norway, #2 in Switzerland and Greece, #5 in Germany, #15 in UK (#2 among rnb efforts).
What does it matter when you've snatched gold and platinum certifications around the world, and retired from the rap game just a year earlier? Yes. Jay was still retired. Soon, sooner than usual, he would be back, but in 2004 he was still #1 on the Billboard 200. And still retired. Either way, seriously, DO NOT BUY IT. I don't even recommend listening to "Numb / Encore", just forget it.
Rating: 3/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment