Jay-Z and Kanye West – Watch the Throne
Def Jam: 2011
Each year, there’s that one beat that every Lil, Big, and MC has to rap over, a distinguished list that includes “A Milli”, “Exhibit C”, “Devil in a New Dress”, and most recently, “Otis” from Watch the Throne. Results were predictably mixed, with Jadakiss and Styles P doing the song the most justice. Jay-Z, as he likes to remind us, is not every Lil, Big, and MC. He’s Hova. He doesn’t just drop his own version of a song. After hearing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he called Kanye into his office, asked Memphis Bleek to grab him some coffee, and told Kanye he wanted his own version of that whole album. Hours later, Consequence was informed that the Cons TV sessions were put on hold until further notice.
Watch the Throne is more celebratory and triumphant in tone than its predecessor, but sonically Kanye continues his foray into the experimental, eschewing the boom-bap that for some odd reason people want him to go back to. The term that Kanye coins in “Otis”, “sophisticated ignorance,” is the prevalent theme, the refined-meets-the -streets chemistry behind “Niggas in Paris”. They still know how to party, they just have a larger budget to do it with. “Gotta Have It” (where James Brown somehow didn’t score a “featuring” credit like Otis Redding did) has Jay-Z flaunting his Scrooge McDuck-like wealth by “planking on million” over a Neptunes beat that sounds nothing like the spaceship fare we’ve become accustomed to. The celebration of decadence and excess that was “Hell of a Life” is reincarnated in “That’s My Bitch”, a guilty dancefloor pleasure with a guest appearance by La Roux that is sure to delight the Pabst Blue Ribbon crowd.
“No Church in the Wild” is the firestarter, with the thumping kick drum and twanging guitar conjuring images of two outlaws speeding down a desert highway, presumably away from the authorities and towards Vegas. The buttery-smooth Odd Future crooner Frank Ocean delivers the uber-quotable “Human being to a mob/What’s a mob to a king?/What’s a king to a god?/What’s a god to a nonbeliever/who don’t believe in anything?” hook and upstages the rest of the album’s guests, especially Beyoncé on the throwaway “Lift Off”, which inexplicably beat out “The Joy” for an album spot. They could have looped the Dexter-esque interlude for the 4:26 that “Lift Off” got and the album would have been better off.
There’s time for seriousness on Watch The Throne and it’s pulled off remarkably well on “New Day”, a RZA production that has Jay and Kanye writing verbal letters to their unborn sons. Kanye displays a self-awareness about his image and his past actions, addressing his ego, failed relationships, and controversial statements with the desire that his son not follow his example. Kanye lasts four songs after that before making another provocative statement on “Murder to Excellence”m citing the 509 reported homicides in Chicago in 2008 compared to the 314 killed in Iraq that year. Watch the Throne concludes with the Cassius-sampled “Why I Love You”, which may as well have been titled “BEANIE SIEGEL, I HEAR YOU’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT JIGGA, THIS SONG IS DEDICATED TO YOU.”
As gaudy as many of the songs are, Jay-Z and Kanye view their self-indulgences differently, as Kanye absolutely revels in them, although he knows he shouldn’t. Jay-Z celebrates because he’s glad he’s not selling crack anymore and he’s married to Beyoncé, which may factor into Kanye West sounding more motivated than Jay on Watch The Throne. Kanye outshines Jay-Z on most of the album in a bid to shake the “Kanye West can’t rap” criticisms that somehow still cling to him. Nobody is confusing Kanye with Rakim, but he’s clever and he’s progressed exponentially since “Through the Wire”. Replay value has been a strength of both Jay-Z’s and West’s catalogs, and Watch the Throne has it in spades. It’s by no means a classic, but they didn’t set out to create a game-changing masterpiece, either.
4 out of 5
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