I, nor many, made any secret of our level of excitement for this album to come out. While Mos Def is undoubtedly (see how I avoided a pun?) my favourite all-around authentic rapper, it is also fairly clear to anyone knows me that I love Jay-Z and Kanye West. I wrote an 18 page paper about Jay for a class in college and listen to Yeezy’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy probably once a week, at least.
So when I heard that two of my favourite rappers were working on an album together I allowed my imagination to get the better of me. I unfortunately felt like neither of the two would waste my time and money on something that would be something of a throwaway album in the context of either artist’s discographies (which I own all of). When “H.A.M.” was released on the internet, I was underwhelmed by the beat as well as either of Kanye and Jay-Z’s verses. It was just, well, overkill.
But I didn’t let my feelings about “H.A.M.” distort how I felt generally about Watch The Throne. I was still excited by the idea. Like Tom in the film (500) Days of Summer I had illusions in my mind of how I thought the album would sound, which have run contrary to the reality of what it actually sounds like.
I even decided not to listen to the album’s first single, “Otis,” because I wanted to hear the album in its entirety before I judged it. But this album began to stink of overhyped, commercially manufactured mediocrity from two artists that many believed were above that sort of thing. At least I thought they were.
As the entire world knows, Jay and Ye decided to release the album exclusively on iTunes under the pretense of wanting to create an “event” in which their fans would enjoy their album all at once, rather than having some of their fans who knew where to get leaks tell their other friends about that new Ye joint, etc. etc. This is really just an attempt to pad both of their bank accounts, ones which already would pay for all of the luxury items they brag about possessing in exorbitant amounts.
Some band called Radiohead was able to avoid leaking an album and creating an event for their fans to enjoy simultaneously the world over, and they didn’t ask their fans to pay $14.99 for their work. Radiohead instead announced In Rainbows ten days before releasing it and allowed their fans to decide how much they wanted to pay for their digital download. A fan could also pay a significant amount of money for a “deluxe” album, with artwork and other features that made the purchase seem worthwhile for those with that sort of money. Meanwhile Jay and Ye’s deluxe album offers their fans one song that had already been out and more than likely in everyone’s libraries (“H.A.M.”) and three other songs that are actually better than maybe half of the tracks included in the regular release. So I guess that’s some consolation.
Watch The Throne is reflective of the awkwardness buried in its genre’s sea change from being typified by adversarial leanings towards more of a kumbaya mentality. Hip-hop used to be a genre characterized by artists that were not interested in the glorification of “teams” so much as the idolization of an individual. I cannot imagine Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur getting together to produce an album like Watch The Throne.
Albums like Biggie’s Ready To Die were the Horatio Alger stories of generation x. One man’s triumph over nearly unbeatable odds (socially static classes in which one’s way out was drug dealing or playing basketball) whose end product was an album that represented the reaction of a man who had just finished a marathon.
Jay once characterized an album as “a movie. You put on this pair of headphones, close your eyes and go through this movie without experiencing it for the most part. You get to go through this fantasy world, where the ultra, super hero guy who nobody could harm, has been through a tough situation and he came out great. Take the CD out. Take the headphones off and go shoot hoops. That’s a very education.”
If Watch The Throne was a film, it would be some sort of weird mix of the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars series. Two fantastic trilogies on their own, but awkward as hell if combined.
In the pursuit of creating a spectacle, Jay and Ye have missed by some distance the opportunity of making a true classic. They instead authored a novelty, a keepsake for fans of their solo material. Buying Watch The Throne is like buying an “I <3 NY” t-shirt while visiting New York City. Now I am somewhat happy that I did not spend in the triple digits to see them perform a novelty record.
I would spend that much, however, to see either of them perform individually, or even one before the other, just not together. Like neopolitan ice cream, designed to appease the indecisive among us that cannot decide if they like chocolate, vanilla or strawberry more than any other flavour, Watch The Throne seeks to give hip-hop heads the unpredictable artistry and production of Kanye West with the somewhat predictable tour de force of drug kingpin turned pop star Jay-Z. It instead leaves me wanting more of both, but giving me half of each. And that’s ultimately unsatisfying.
Having just purchased this on iTunes, thereby giving in to the corporate con job pulled off by Jay and Ye, I do not have many regrets about the $14.99 I will never have back. Watch The Throne is a unique album worth having in one’s collection, if not for the music itself but for what the music says about the culture that birthed it. The album does not reduce my affection for either artist, it lays bare who Jay-Z and Kanye West are in 2011: two people trapped between their desire to createart and their desire to make money. It is as Jay raps on “Why I Love You” “These n***as not know what they do.”
The music itself is more spectacle than anything else, and the song that makes this most obvious is “Ni**as In Paris.” I thought the production on this track was especially impressive, and I loved the Blades Of Glory sampling. Will Ferrell’s comment on the subject of lady lumps is quite emblematic of the entire Watch The Throne project. “NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT MEANS! BUT IT’S PROVOCATIVE. IT GETS THE PEOPLE GOIN!'”
Rating: 6.5
