Jay-Z and Kanye West, Watch the Throne
Reviewed by: Christian Hagen
It’s tough to pinpoint exactly when Jay-Z and Kanye West went from rapping about their lives to rapping about kings, queens, galaxies, devils, and gods. On Reasonable Doubt, Jay’s accounts of his life in the drug game were both harrowing and heartfelt, even relatable to some degree to the average person, scraping by on what they could manage. On The College Dropout, West waxed poetically on his childhood, his family, the car crash that nearly took his life, all very human concerns. Of course they were braggarts, of course each declared themselves to be the greatest, but they did so within the cultural understanding of hip-hop; it would be next to impossible to find a rapper who didn’t declare him or her self, or his or her crew, to be the best in the game.
But gradually, Jay began turning out hits like “Big Pimpin’,” casually throwing money off the deck of a yacht in videos, building an empire, declaring himself not a master but a king. Similarly, West moved from commenting on materialism in “All Falls Down” to bragging about it on “Good Life,” and slowly, as his public persona began to clash with his conscience, he was able to make My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, an album which placed him on a grander stage than his peers, rapping for his soul in a self-described struggle between heaven and hell.
This inflation of self-importance has not detracted from the music, for the most part. Until now, Jay and ‘Ye have maintained quality, the increasingly rotund bubbles of their egos not quite ready to burst.
That is, until now.
Watch the Throne, the first official collaborative full-length from Jay-Z and Kanye West, aims higher and farther on almost every track than either of the performers have ever attempted before, and in almost all cases, the tracks either shoot too far into excess or stall and crash back to Earth.
The tone is established immediately. Frank Ocean (the most anachronistic member of Odd Future) lays down a biblical hook: “Human beings to the mob./What’s a mob to a king?/What’s a king to a God?/What’s a God to a non-believer/Who don’t believe in anything?” Jay and West are no longer even trying to set themselves apart from the rest by way of their skills; they seem to believe the only way to assert dominance on the scene is to anoint themselves as mythical beings, so tall they cannot be touched by the masses. As Jay says in his opening verse, “Jesus was a carpenter/Yeezy laid beats/Hova flow the Holy Ghost/get the hell up out your seats.”
Musically, “No Church” is one of the stronger productions on the album, with a sinister guitar riff, simple synths, and tribal drums. Considering the lyrical content, it’s unusually low-key, until the monkey screeches and police sirens and dark French street music invade the outro.
Most of the other songs do not fare nearly as well. “Lift Off” features a fairly intense guest vocal from Beyonce, and at first the song serves as a pretty tight club anthem. Still, the song can barely stand under the weight of its ideas. The space-travel conceit, especially the ill-advised shuttle countdown sequence, becomes downright cheesy very quickly.
The nigh-industrial “Who Gon Stop Me” is a grating show-off throw-off, while “Niggas in Paris” is downright laughable; the biggest difference between this song and The Lonely Island’s “The Creep” is the lack of Nicki Minaj. They must recognize the inherent ludicrousness of it all, as the song is twice interrupted by clips of Will Ferrel in Blades of Glory. When the song grinds to a halt as West slings his “don’t let me into my zone” outro, it’s somewhat startling, almost powerful, but it’s another chest-beating exercise, and a brief one at that.
The biggest problem with the beats on many of these songs is that they simply lack variety, or excitement. The synths on “Welcome to the Jungle” could be a telegraph message reading “Zzzzz.” “Gotta Have It” is background party music, not necessarily bad, just lacking in imagination. Perhaps the biggest, and most disappointing, misstep on Watch the Throne is “Otis.” The potential for an Otis Redding-sampling West track with all the care and respect he gave to the likes of Bon Iver and Gil Scott-Heron on his last album is endless. The end result, however, is a few seconds of Redding on one of the most annoying loops in ‘Ye’s entire career. It’s reminiscent of “Barry Bonds” off Graduation, a song with so much pressure and potential (the dream of a Lil’ Wayne guest on a Kanye West track was insane in those days) that it could either soar or fall completely flat. Like “Bonds” before it, “Otis” lands with a thud, a frustrating exercise in wasted ideas.
Even the best tracks here have their issues. “New Day” is the album’s most emotionally real song, with each rapper speaking to their unborn children in a way that is even a little sweet, if bitterly so. Unfortunately, even when they’re trying to be honest and self-effacing, the rappers can’t help but take pot-shots at their critics. And it’s a shame that one of the album’s best beats and hooks (the latter courtesy of La Roux’s Elly Jackson) should belong to a song as asinine as “That’s My Bitch.” The only song that stands on its own is “Why I Love You,” which excites right out of the gate and features the best elements of a typical West production: Thrills, peaks, valleys, strings, and a thunderous beat. If it weren’t the last song on the album, it wouldn’t feel so dissatisfying. As it is, it’s too little, too late.
But the music isn’t the biggest problem on Watch the Throne. That would be the merging of two of rap’s most insane egos, leading to some extremely questionable ideas making their way into the mix. Maybe if West were still a street-level rapper, he’d avoid starting a song with a line like “This is something like the Holocaust.” Maybe if Jay were just breaking into the mainstream, he’d think twice before making a song comparing himself to civil rights leaders (not to mention Jesus). Maybe if they weren’t considered two of the best rappers alive, Jay and West wouldn’t make songs that try so hard to prove that they deserve to be royalty. This isn’t grandiosity like that on West’s last album, a maximalist brilliance that deserves exploration and examination. Instead, it’s like two men trying to carve statues of themselves by examining their reflections in the marble; it’s a futile effort steeped in vanity and lacking in awareness.
At what point did the music world stop judging artists by the talent of their art and instead just gave credence to whomever bragged about their achievments the loudest or the fastest? What we need isn’t another album of Jay-Z and Kanye West telling us that they are the best, what we need is another album of them being the best.
Maybe if they stopped trying so hard to be Gods, Jay and West would remember what it means to be good musicians.