Jay-Z & Kanye West – Watch The Throne (Mercury)
4/5
Ahh, what a lovely surprise. This has been on the cards for about a decade now, but Jay-Z and Kanye West seem to have chosen their time carefully. Watch the Throne drops just as the two are peaking – in Kanye’s case creatively, in Jay-Z’s case as the undisputed Godfather of modern hip-hop. Though the latter hasn’t released a consistently great record since 2003’s (heavily Kanye-indebted) The Black Album, can you think of anyone who can touch him at the moment in terms of global superstardom and pop-cultural significance? Didn’t think so, and if anyone said Bono then you’re just a massive liar. Yeezy, on the other hand, knows that he can make good the momentum that carried him through 2010 and spawned the headcrunchingly ace My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and the numerous G.O.O.D. Friday releases (one of which, ‘The Joy’, appears as a bonus track here). His productions are all over the record, with his hand lent to 9 of the 12 tracks, and those that work sparkle with a panache and confidence as bright as the album’s cover.
Only one of the tracks is solely a West production though. ‘Otis’, which has been shooting up the Billboard 100 for the past few weeks, is one of the album’s least focused numbers. The beat – a breathy chopping-and-screwing of Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ – is a great idea in practice, and is executed pretty well. Until the guys start rapping over the top of it, that is. Maybe it’s just an overload of talent, maybe there aren’t enough ideas, but the song never really gets going again after the false dawn of that barking vocal from Redding. The main problem is that the beat is pretty much completely Redding’s voice, which means that anything Kanye and Jay-Z say just sounds like a bunch of very intelligent dudes talking over each other so that nothing quite makes sense. Weirdly, along with ‘Otis’, the other promos from Watch the Throne hardly do a very good record justice. The Beyonce-driven ‘Lift Off’ never really, ahem, lifts off, and you find yourself waiting for a killer beat that never kicks in, and ‘H.A.M.’ doesn’t even feature (except as an iTunes bonus track), an inexplicable choice given the brilliantly wacky Don-Giovanni-with-drum-machines thing it does that would slot so easily into the album’s tracklisting.
However, if you’ve been disappointed by the stuff you’ve heard in the run up to the album’s release, fear not. On Watch the Throne, as was the case on … Twisted Fantasy, West’s best productions are the result of having another couple of guys hanging around the studio and twiddling the buttons with him. Opener ‘No Church in the Wild’ kicks off proceedings in expectedly brooding and elaborate style, Frank Ocean’s silky tenor working excellently against the macho beat that harks back to some of Kanye’s productions for Jay-Z at the turn of the century. Jigga’s voice is the first of the pair that we hear, and he sounds hungrier than he has for years. In fact, the most interesting thing about the track is how much you realise the two have influenced each other, becoming closer stylistically as well as personally over the last decade – Jay-Z wraps his grandiose mannerisms around the sort of gospel imagery that peppered The College Dropout, while Kanye uses the natural sneer in his Midwest drawl to bring out both the enticement and repulsiveness inherent in the sort of druggy and dirty tales that Carter founded his career on.
As the record wears on, it becomes clear that the pair bring out the best in each other. Jay-Z knows that he can’t keep delivering raps about the same sort of stories that populated Reasonable Doubt, but has been struggling more and more of late to find subject matter. In this respect, Kanye seems to sort him out – but it’s taken time. Compare Jigga’s messy verse on … Twisted Fantasy’s ‘Monster’ to the tight delivery on the similarly funky and similarly fantastic ‘That’s My Bitch’ and you start to see how he’s become more comfortable with rapping alongside Kanye rather than having to lock eyes with him through the booth. ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ is one of this best performances in a long while, as the uncompromising and moody production provides a base from which Carter releases a vocal charged with confusion. Fame has robbed him of the sense of reality he paradoxically tries to get across in his raps, and he feels lost to the world, out of touch with God, his family and what made him love music in the first place. ‘Momma look at your son, what happened to my smile … Champagne for the pain, weed for the low/God damn I’m so high, where the fuck did I go?’. From a rapper who has so long prided himself on not showing weakness and letting the music do the talking (see ‘Song Cry’ from The Blueprint), to hear him shout out ‘I’m fucking depressed’ is pretty remarkable stuff.
Kanye benefits from Carter’s composure and authority, something West has always seemed to lack. After the reversal of roles on ‘No Church in the Wild’, ‘Niggas in Paris’ sees the pair switch back once more, and this means Yeezy doing his morally vapid Midwest Yuppie thing. However, in a refreshing act of self analysis, Kanye calls bullshit on his own bullshit, following up a lyric about his ‘niggas in Paris … going gorillas’ with a movie sample; ‘What does that mean?’ one guy asks; ‘Nobody knows what it means’, a voice replies, ‘but it’s provocative’. And ‘New Day’ is Kanye’s stab at a ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, and as the more sentimental of the two he allows autotune and synth to wash over him as he delivers a remarkably candid lyric about the personal and private Kanye West – ‘I might even make [my son] Republican/So you know that he love white people’. The post-808s and Heartbreak beat, coupled with echoes of Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’, gives us a perfect example of the Kanye West ethos of 2011 – he has soul, but in such an electronic age, how is he meant to express himself without machines?
Apart from the saccharine and corny ‘Made in America’, there are no bad songs on Watch the Throne. In terms of Kanye’s recent hit-rate, that’s about average; for Jay-Z, it represents a massive improvement. Nothing on the album quite hits the highest of highs that both have set for themselves over their dazzling careers, but the level of consistency displayed here is rivalled by few others. This might have been a little bit on the side for the two as they kick back and discuss the Illuminati or something, but what they’ve come up with might end up being the best hip-hop album of 2011.
Artists in this article: Jay Z, Kanye West
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