<\/a>Dropping soon: Mandy '11 (feat. Ethan Embry)<\/p><\/div>\n
It\u2019s not mediocre, though. It\u2019s actually pretty fucking good, and it\u2019s even stellar at times. The James Brown and Incredible Bongo Band samples on That\u2019s My Bitch continue to get me so excited that I want to put my fist through a wall*, and it seems like nobody can deny that Why I Love You is an incredible beat, likely because it is only one teenage whisper-monologue away from sounding like M83 decided to start producing hip-hop**. The more epic tracks are musically great, but the thing that holds them back is how odd Jay-Z feels on the grander songs. Kanye might be the most energetic person alive, and accordingly feels right on the grand production, but Jay-Z tends to prefer to rap in a laid-back manner, which detracts from songs like Who Gon\u2019 Stop Me and That\u2019s My Bitch. However, on higher energy tracks that give him room to breathe (Welcome to the Jungle, Ni**as in Paris), we only feel uncomfortable when hearing some of his cornier lyrics.<\/p>\n
*Kanye and Q-Tip, you owe me drywall money.
\n<\/em>**Or it just sounds like it\u2019s produced by Cassius, I suppose.<\/em><\/p>\nMusically, the album is pretty great. Half of the tracks sound like they were produced when Kanye and company were visiting The Grid in TRON, and the others – despite sounding like they were recorded in an actual recording studio – are mostly good. Only Made in America is a complete miss musically, although Lift Off is also significantly less than stellar as well. Lyrically, though? Both rappers have been much better elsewhere, and the catchy couplets that make Jay-Z as good as he is are mostly absent here. On first, second, and twenty-sixth listen, the record sounds like more time was spent on music than lyrics, and I suppose that\u2019s fine. There are still lyrical highlights, they\u2019re just swept under the rug by a surprising amount of awkwardness. This is likely due to the fact that there aren\u2019t a lot of verses where the two rappers aren\u2019t teaming up in some way, something that not a lot of modern rappers have much experience doing. The verses where they don\u2019t have to lead into each other, such as Jay-Z\u2019s verse on No Church in the Wild or Kanye\u2019s on New Day, are often the most interesting lyrically, because they are back in the comfort zone of a solitary rapper starting an idea and finishing it in 16 bars. But that tag team aspect that is present throughout is also kind of the whole charm of the record.<\/p>\n
Hearing rappers go back and forth on a verse, like Kanye and Jay-Z do throughout Watch The Throne, will always make me smile. It\u2019s probably just the Run-DMC fan in me, but this type of thing really doesn\u2019t exist in popular hip-hop anymore outside of the Beastie Boys. And the fact that MCA, Ad Rock and Mike D have been around since before Scottie Pippen started playing NBA ball basically proves my point. With hip-hop\u2019s unofficial 38th\u00a0birthday occurring yesterday<\/a>, Watch The Throne looks back to where hip-hop came from (while referencing classic Mobb Deep, Audio Two and OutKast songs and sampling hip-hop staples Nina Simone, Otis Redding, James Brown, and more), and Kanye and Jay-Z often use this style to rap back and forth to each other about paintings and cars they\u2019ve purchased. While popular hip-hop has always been at least kind of materialistic, it\u2019s inarguable that it has gotten more so, mostly because there are simply more profits to be made from hip-hop now. Kanye and Jay-Z\u2019s idea to do a joint record may have been inspired by the hip-hop they grew up listening to, but they still felt compelled to reflect what is most prevalent in modern hip-hop. And, in turn, their new record reflects what we already felt about them. Like I said a week or so ago, Kanye is modern popular hip-hop, and so is Jay-Z. There might be things you like about them and things you don\u2019t, but your opinion of their work will always say more about your relationship with hip-hop than it will anything else. Which is exactly what Watch The Throne says about Kanye West and Jay-Z themselves.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alex writes about exactly what you would expect him to write about this week: Watch The Throne.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[184],"tags":[292,291,308],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1682"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1698,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions\/1698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}