Jay-Z and Kanye West: Watch the Throne

(Roc-a-Fella)

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You might already have heard what’s off-key about Jay-Z and Kanye West’s blockbuster collaboration, said Nitsuh Abebe in NewYorkMagazine​.com. A runaway hit since its midnight release a few weeks ago, the album finds these two kings of hip-hop serving up “a catalogue of the burdens of success” at a moment when national economies are crumbling and non-celebrity jobs are scarce. “Reliably good” musically, the album can be interpreted as “a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America”—worrying about what their rise to riches possibly does for all the other social underdogs whom they once considered peers. The disappointment is that they have so little of interest to say.

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At least “the mood is playful” on many of the cuts, said Rob Harvilla in Spin. In “Made in America,” Jay-Z quits his boasting about Basquiats and Maybachs long enough to celebrate his grandma’s banana pudding, and both rappers have fun bragging about their women on the “delightfully crass ‘That’s My Bitch.’” With West dreaming up the songs’ soundscapes, “the vast majority of the production is amazing.” On “New Day,” for instance, a Nina Simone vocal is stretched like taffy across “funereal” piano chords. But to what end? “So many rich sonic environments in which to learn about expensive watches!”

The focus on consumption possibly “explains an entire generation,” said Hua Hsu in Grantland. These two multimillionaires, after all, are living the dream that hip-hop has set as its North Star since the beginning, and the dream has disappointed them. As artists, they’re masters of “surfaces and allusions.” As leaders, they can only direct their fans to seize the type of power that’s defined by Web hits and videos gone viral. That’s not true power; that’s marketing. Yet it might be the best we can expect from two artists who seem to favor “artifice over reality, fantastical tales over true conquest.”