Kanye West. Photocredit: Paul.cook http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwilliamcook/6022673164/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Watch the Throne is an eagerly-awaited collaboration between hip-hop maestros Jay-Z and Kanye West. It was released on Sunday exclusively to iTunes (in a move that angered record stores). Fans waited with bated breath to see (or rather hear) if this would be a cacophonous clash of the titans or a transcendently tuneful collaboration. The creative Kanye stands on one side, and the business-like Jay-Z on the other. Will they make beautiful music? Does hip-hop even allow such a thing?
The two hip-hop heroes had a lavish party for 400 guests at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to celebrate the launch. Hacks listened to it in the planetarium. As soon as the album was released it knocked Adele off the iTunes download charts. Its physical avatar comes in a gold case. It reeks of opulence, as do its two diamond-encrusted makers. So is it an instant classic, a terrible disappointment, or something in between? Whatever it is, it’s got everybody talking.
- Pulling out the rhetorical stops. There is a “triumphal subtext”, gushed Chris Richards on The Washington Post, beneath the “miasma of reflexive haterade and compulsory adulation.” In a lovely alliterative tricolon, Richards called the album “compelling, complex, conflicted,” as well as being “densely layered with commentary on race and class.” There’s no ego clash, with the pair volleying “between the contemplative and the petulant”. It’s about rebellion and gluttony, but whilst Jay-Z provides us with “diamond-encrusted verses”, this album belongs to West and his “power of the ego” – “something a recession can never take away.”
- Let’s be a bit more careful here. Reeves Wiedeman on The New Yorker was a bit less slavering: the record is “[p]retty good, after two listens. It lacks the majesty of West’s last record, but Jay-Z gives the whole endeavor more forward momentum.” Michaelangelo Matos on The Guardian’s music blog agreed: while not “an obvious classic,” “it is impressive. Both rappers sound hungry, if restrained, like they’re giving each other room. Kanye keeps looking for new angles, both lyrically and in rhyming cadence, while Jay-Z seems more like he’s comfortable taking aim, firing and hitting.”
- Well, whatever you say about their egos, they’re on top form. It’s all about how Jay-Z “deserves all his riches”, said Chris Willman on The Wrap. He had a tough life. He deserves his wife, the mega-star Beyoncé, too. He’s not shy, either, comparing himself to The Beatles and rapping about getting a front row seat at the Grammys. Though West’s ego “isn’t any less large” than Jay-Z’s , their differences lie in their attitudes to women. Whilst Jay-Z prefers monogamy, Kanye seems “less monogamously inclined than ever.” Even so, there’s “nary a dull moment,” and these two “poets” are on top form.
- Gush away! Indeed, pontificated Hua Hsu on Grantland, what with the recession and everything, “[r]arely has an album seemed so simultaneously in and out of touch with the exigencies of American life.” Kanye and Jay-Z’s partnership has proved that a collaboration can exist in the hip-hop world without one or the other being shot. What’s more, they’ve produced “an album of surfaces and allusions, of prayers shouted through bullhorns and references to the MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents. It is music that is self-consciously epic, more overwhelming than enjoyable.”
- Or not. The Wellversed asked if the album lived up to the hype. The answer? ”Nope. It’s solid. Sequencing killed it. A little too much ‘rich negro’ rap.” Not living up to expectations, it’s a ”3.75 out of 5. It’s just too all over the place for me. We all know what they COULD do, they just didn’t quite DO it.”
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