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Ten Favorite Moments on Blueprint 3: Part One

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1. The Beat on “What We Talkin’ About”

A big, swooshing, synthy soundscape anchored by some stumbling, awesomely limp Kanye drums. Could be from a Jeezy album cut or a Vangelis soundtrack (which are basically the same) and either way, it’s open-spacey enough for Jay to just kinda go off on any and everything. Rap’s at its best when it’s either obsessively, perfectly formal and cohesive or when it’s a big, weird mess. “What We Talkin’ About” is the latter: Jay rapping distinctly grown man shit over production that’s trying in every way to sound hyper-contemporary.

2. What There “Ain’t nothing cool” About On “What We Talkin’ About”

Amongst many of Jay’s winning qualities, it’s his understanding of balance that will keep him relevant. That’s to say, getting serious and all guidance counselor-like in your raps, when you don’t do it all the time, holds more weight: “Ain’t nothing cool about carryin’ a strap/About worryin’ your moms and burying your best cat/Talkin’ about revenge while carrying his casket/All teary-eyed about to take it to a mattress-”. This stems from experience and gained knowledge. Jay’s not speaking in platitudes there.

3. Extended 9-11 Shit-Talk Metaphor on “Thank You”

Just an impressive piece of visceral writing, touching on sense and action and weaving it into a moment-to-moment narrative: “I was gonna 9-11 them but they didn’t need the help/And they did a good job, them boys is talented as hell/Not only did they brick they put a building up as well/Then ran a plane into that building and when that building fell/Ran to the crash site with no mask on and inhaled/Toxins deep inside they lungs until both of them was filled/Blew a cloud out like a L/Into a jar then took a smell/Because they heard that second-hand smoke kills.” The genius of this is that though he egregiously uses 9-11 for some shit-talk, his attention to detail–moment-to-moment it gets uglier with each line–touches on some of the chaos of the real event.

4. “Empire State of Mind”s Glorious Chorus

There’s this cornball, guitar chug stuck in this otherwise formalist, super-respectable song and who knows why it’s there, but it’s a good cue just how out-there explosive the hook on “Empire State of Mind” is gonna be. Wrapped up in the hook is not only Jay’s success but all the stuff that led to it and that’s very, very different from many of his recent “I’m rich now” songs which were fully concerned with the moment. As if wealth and comfort were proof enough for him to do and say anything and to address his poor kid past, crack-pushing career, his buncha years as a nobody rapper, on a level more complex than “I used to be this and now I ain’t” is beneath him. Here he’s finally navigating two worlds with the same level of detail and acceptance. Real grown-man stuff.

5. Jay’s “Probably” on “Real As It Gets”

“Now I eat quail, I’ll probably never go to jail”. The quail line is just plain hilarious–a straight-faced parody of food-as-materialism in rap–and the jail line is just devastating. It’s that “probably”. Like even at forty with a shit-ton of money and success and everything else, Jay can’t for sure say he won’t end up in jail. He’s touching on the “street” shit still rolling around in his brain–for anyone that’s ever lived recklessly, the appeal’s always there–and acknowledging his own like, latent self-destruction. There’s also something about BP3 that has Jay not only dealing with his past, but his blackness, something he either avoids–because he’s something of a like hyper-capitalist Neo-Con and can’t acknowledge multi-culti nonsense–or reaches for (like his street-cred references), just to short-cut thoughtful discussion. But throughout BP3, there’s something about realizing that he’s still a black dude in America and being mad-rich matters…and just doesn’t at all. This coupled with the many, joyous references to Obama’s election and sometimes clunky, but politically-minded lines like “It’s 2010, not 1864″ (from “Off That”), develops BP3’s strand of terse but wise commentary on race in America in 2009.

further reading/viewing:
-”Ten Favorite Moments” on Kanye West’s Graduation by Tom Breihan
-”Citizen Jay Z” by Armond White
-Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
-The All-American Skin Game or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and Short of It 1990-1994 by Stanley Crouch
-Wikipedia Entry for 1864

Written by Brandon

September 8th, 2009 at 5:45 pm

Posted in Blueprint 3, Jay-Z

Aging Gracefully

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So, Juicy J’s recently released two modest-budget, DV videos with an eye for the details of the streets. Swelling with super-specific hometown pride, “North Memphis Like Me” bubbles over with the character of Juicy’s birthplace–this is hyper-regionality; the kind that can’t be turned into a movement by some A & Rs.

Then there’s “Let’s Get High” (DIRECTED BY JORDAN TOWER), sorta the opposite of “North Memphis Like Me” but not really. Full of the same gritty reality but it’s deeply, disturbingly insular: Juicy wandering around a parking lot smoked-out.

-”Niggaz Ain’t Barin’ Dat”

Above is “Niggaz Ain’t Barin’ Dat” off Underground Vol. 1, a collection of Triple-Six demos or early works or something (it’s subtitled “1991-1994″) that you should go out and find if you’ve not heard it already–it’s fairly easy to find “Used” in your hometown’s record store, if your hometown still has a record store. If it doesn’t, it will be at your mall’s FYE…priced at like, 17.99.

I think Underground Vol. 1 is fairly prevalent in the used bins because a buncha people’ve bought it thinking there would be something like “Sippin’ On Some Syrup” or “Stay Fly” on there and not like, proto-Glitch, fuzzed out electronic weirdness that doesn’t even always have rapping on it.

There’s precedent here for sure (DJ Spanish Fly’s loops, Screw music’s bliss, etc.) and this is surely rap music, but it’s wrestling around in the same sonic arena with weirder, more explicitly strange electronic and sample-based music of the time (Gas, The Orb, Loop) and of right fucking now (Skaters, Tim Hecker, Block Beataz).

It’s more like hearing the earliest, in-the-garage, fuzzed-to-hell demos from Mayhem or Satryricon or something. That “something” being the really obvious influence that I threw out a moment ago: DJ Spanish Fly.

So yeah, it’s rap music too and if you’re listening hard enough, isn’t all that different from “Syrup” or “Stay Fly”. Hidden within there is all the stuff that made those classics. That’s to say, there’s not exactly a way to be “disappointed” by this collection unless you’re a complete dolt. And though Three-Six have certainly dropped the ball here and there, they don’t have a “worthless” release in their discography and the story of how their sound travelled from clunky loops and delicately crumbling synths to still pretty nutty but more digestable beats is one of the most fascinating in hip-hop history. Namely, because it’s organic–or relatively organic, don’t wanna idealize anybody here.

Same way say, the Velvet Underground went from avant-garde to MOR in like five years. It didn’t have too much to do with record sales.

And in a sense, it’s the antithesis of how Jay Z ends up with the sonics of BP3 and it’s the complete opposite of Raekwon’s facsimile of 90s New York rap. Three-Six roll over current trends and pick up tiny pieces (a tinge of auto-tune, a slab of chipmunk soul) and find a proper–or fairly proper–place for it, they don’t “reinvent” themselves and even when they do, they don’t fucking announce it. And because their sound is always moving forward, they can jump back to ‘95 seamlessly, so it doesn’t sound like they’re trying real hard–so hard that, like Rae and company, it leads to an album that sounds like the idea of what 1995 rap sounded to someone who wasn’t there when it happened than how it really did sound.

further reading/viewing:
-Mythologies by Roland Barthes
-DJ Spanish Fly’s MySpace
-”Hypnagogic Pop” by David Keenan from Wire Magazine #147
-Sway visits DJ Paul in the Studio

Written by Brandon

September 7th, 2009 at 4:53 am

Posted in Jay-Z, Raekwon, Three Six Mafia

It’s All In the Details: Comments on Specific Parts of Some Rap Songs

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Man, it’s 2009 and between months and months of hype and then the imminent album leak, nothing’s interesting and it’s all boring before the first album cut even finishes. Who has time for entire songs? And who has time for entire songs reviews? Here’s reviews of parts of songs, mostly good parts. Maybe a recurring feature here, we’ll see…

-RZA’s “We soldiers…” coda on “Black Mozart”
off Only Built For Cuban Linx 2

RZA’s high-pitched but gutteral wail of a chant that ends “Black Mozart” brings a flood of palpable pain into the song and the album, something it kinda lacks overall. It’s like RZA found an old blunt of ODB’s behind a monitor or something, smoked it, and the saliva ghost of ‘Dirty–his exuberance, his pain and confusion, his deep pontificating on the er, “struggle”–possessed RZA and he ran into the booth and cried this out. Because rap’s so sissified now (and it just is, sorry, it is) it’s easy to repaint all those St. Ideas and Timbs, gritty-beat makers as ineffable hard-asses but in all that music is obviously a lot of pain, and sometimes they even let it seap into the music explicitly; RZA bring some of that back on “Black Mozart”.

-Beanie Sigel’s biblical syntax on “Run to the Roc”
off The Broad Street Bully

Beans adopting a sort of absurd but strangely affecting mess of Biblical talk (lots of “thy” and words like “wrath”) shows you how seriously Jay Z’s dropping of “The Roc” is for those involved. “Street code” is doctrine for better and worse, and when you violate that, it’s over for you. But it also hurts because there’s more at-stake than just a bunch of feelings (and now empty wallets) but like an entire belief system. For Beans and company, the dismissal is tragic and mythic and all that, an ultimate violation and sign of disrespect. Biblical. Shakespearan. All that smart-person stuff applied to things to legitimize them. Notice how this is still threat-rap and tough-talk, he doesn’t explain why because he doesn’t have to explain it. It just is. The shit’s doctrine.

-Jay-Z’s revelation that his teacher was a dick on “So Ambitious”
off Blueprint 3

“I felt so inspired by what my teacher said/Said I’d either be dead or be a reefer-head/Not sure if that’s how adults should speak to kids/’specially when all I did was speak in class…”. If there’s an actual theme or like, thesis to BP3, it’s Jay Z actually feeling grown-up, no longer chasing respectability or plain old comfort, just being a fully-functional adult with a wife and responsibilities and shit. With this comes, it seems a deeper realization of his environment, one he once took for granted, also bubbles to the surface. And so, Jay’s really thinking about how having some jerk-off teacher tell you that you’re doomed isn’t normal or really acceptable. Obvious to a lot of us, but maybe not so if it’s how every fucking idealist-turned-nihilist “educator” treated you your whole fucking school career. The line clearly stung, he’s rapping about it years later, only now he’s sort of got it–rap as psychoanalysis.

-The title of Robert Glasper’s “Yes I’m Country (And That’s OK)”
off Double Booked

A good jazz song with a particularly affecting or smart title can somehow make it even better: “Just Friends”, “Idle Moments”, “Mandrake”, “Fables of Faubus”. That said, this has led to a lot of musicians trying really hard to be clever or insightful (a ton of puns, pseudo-poetry, etc) but “Yes I’m Country (And That’s OK)” is like, haiku-perfect. There’s nothing explicitly “country” about the song, no twang or grafting of folk/country melodies here, but there is a certain ease and comfort, a rolling along feeling that indeed, invokes the cliches of a somewhat derisive adjective like “country” but turns them into the strengths big-city fucks are too cool for. A jazz tune for provincials. Cooly confident, but not stupidly prideful either. Robert Glasper’s from Texas.

further reading/viewing:
-Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of OBD by Jamie Lowe
-Harvey Keitel’s wail in Bad Lieutenant
-”The Documentary” by a bunch of the XXL Staff
-Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz by Stanley Crouch

Written by Brandon

September 2nd, 2009 at 7:53 pm

Posted in Beanie Sigel, It's All in the Details, Jay-Z, RZA, Raekwon, Robert Glasper

Blueprint 3 Redux

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Blueprint, his “serious” soul-beat album and Blueprint 2, a big, sprawling double-album that’s critic-proof really, because of course it’ll be a mess–it’s a double album! Black Album, was a retirement victory lap and then, Kingdom Come his regal return. American Gangster, some street shit when the regal stuff didn’t work out so well, vaguely connected to a movie of the same name because once you’ve rapped about how you’re beyond street rap, you can’t rap about hustling straight and get away with it…unless it’s couched in some concept.

And now there’s Blueprint 3, set to “drop” on September 11th, leaked yesterday and seemingly, about Jay’s undeniable victories of the past (a tradition, in his head at least, established by this Blueprint trilogy) and his continued relevance–buttressed by hip, young guests like Kid Cudi and Drake. Like previous not-really-concept, concept albums from the dude, Blueprint 3 seems intent on telling listeners what it’s doing instead of simply doing.

BP3 certainly gives off the feeling of a “final” album from Jay Z: Looking backward and forward, trying to recreate long-gone zeitgeist and capture the now just as well. The problem is every song/minor statement that builds to a album/big statement is mind-bogglingly out of place. Can you kick off your “I’m comfortable in my own skin” album with “What We Talkin’ About”–a song that devotes much of its time to ex friends and business partners? Can you end your album about how you’re a wizened, forever relevant dude with a song that declares you’re “forever young” so much it implies the opposite?

Like every Jay Z album–save for Reasonable Doubt and Black Album which surprise, surprise, hang-on and actually sell their concepts–Blueprint 3 is something of a mess, but there’s quite a few things here and there that would go a long way to making Jay’s latest more listenable and less damned embarrassing. Here’s what Jay can do to save BP3 and it isn’t too late–he’s got a week. Pardon the hubris here, but I really think it’s a pretty dope album with this tracklist.

1. “Thank You”
2. “Already Home” (featuring Kid Cudi)
3. “Empire State of Mind” (featuring Alicia Keys)
4. “D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune)”
5. “Run This Town” (featuring Kanye West & Rihanna)
6. “On to the Next One” (featuring Swizz Beatz)
7. “Off That” (featuring Drake)
8. “Reminder”
9. “Hate” (featuring Kanye West)
10. “Venus Vs. Mars”
11. “Young Forever” (featuring Mr. Hudson)
12. “Real as it Gets” (featuring Young Jeezy)
13. “So Ambitious” (featuring Pharrell)
14. “What We Talkin’ About” (featuring Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun)
15. “A Star Is Born” (featuring J. Cole)

Tracks 1-6: These first six tracks are a look into the past, though tempered by 2009. Continuing the sonic tradition of the other Blueprint albums, if not in sound (corporate-sheen soul-beats) than in energy–they sound relatively conventional, slightly more sophisticated, and maintain a level of fun and enthusiasm. Jay’s rap-rapping on these tracks and though there are some clunkers, he’s on a respectable enough level of cruise-control.

1. “Thank You”
Not only does this sound like a first track, but it wisely introduces the tensions that stretch and confuse BP3. Namely, a mix of humble reverence to this rap game that’s made him a big, fucking superstar and persistent desire to still remind everybody about how important he is. This has worked better in the past, especially on Black Album where he was still king of the world and on the tail-end of pretty much defining the first half of the decade’s rap sound but I think he touches some of the five-years ago swagger–before we all called it swagger–on this track.

As I said before, the album simply cannot begin with “What We Talkin’ About”. The song sounds like a killer intro but Jay’s decision to address essentially irrelevant critics/foes–that’s to say, by 2009, anyone who cares about Jaz-O or Dame or the Roc isn’t a Jay Z fan anymore–on the very first track just kinda ruins the whole album. That said, the song needs to be there because it’s proof Jay’s still street–if only in the sense that he still isn’t mature enough to not shut up about dudes talking shit on him. I’ve moved it towards the end of the album.

“What We Talkin’ About” is also false-advertising in the sense that you think the album’s gonna be Jay’s synthy, party-time, old man version of hipster rap but then there’s plenty of basically normal, Jay Z songs (like the first six tracks on my version), so it’s extra weird to kick the album off like that. I put it as a kind of final movie montage track, second to last on the album.

2. “Already Home” (featuring Kid Cudi)
3. “Empire State of Mind” (featuring Alicia Keys)
This is a quick intro, song-suite within a larger suite about Jay in relation to his hometown and critics: “Thank You”, “Already Home”, and “Empire State of Mind”. Placed later, a song like “Empire State of Mind” becomes tedious, especially right after another female-sung hook (“Run This Town”)– but not bogged-down in clueless sequencing, it’s fairly affecting and a culmination of the cynicism and joy that opens the album.

4. “D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune)”
5. “Run This Town” (featuring Kanye West & Rihanna)
6. “On to the Next One” (featuring Swizz Beatz)
This begins the next suite within a suite, here one where Jay Z talks some fairly awesome shit and brings in some sort of weirdo, presumably more No I.D than Kanye squawks and scronks type production. “Jockin’ Jay Z” can probably go in here too, maybe after “Run This Town”. We’re moving into the next bunch of tracks which to me are more the vaguely “new” or an attempt at a new sound going on in BP3.

Tracks 7-12: So yeah, these next bunch of tracks are what I think most assumed, based on the guest list and some of the pre-release talk, BP3 would sound like: Lots of synths, a safer version of Hell Hath No Fury, Jeezy’s three albums (a better trilogy than Blueprint by the way, or even Kanye’s Graduation, loaded with a slightly up-to-date guest list. Thing is, these songs work pretty damned well one after another, a kind of evil, wandering mix of tough-guy, synth rap.

7. “Off That” (featuring Drake)
Jay and Drake begin this song by saying “Welcome to the future” and so, it makes sense to begin this part of the album with “Off That”. Besides the improved listenability of my re-sequencing, it adds in these little details–like Drake in effect, announcing the shift in sensibility–that suggest the album wasn’t just grafted together but there’s some genuine narrative and emotional arc to the fucking thing besides Jay, over and over being like “I’m still really important”.

8. “Reminder”
9. “Hate” (featuring Kanye West)
10. “Venus Vs. Mars”
11. “Young Forever” (featuring Mr. Hudson)
12. “Real as it Gets” (featuring Young Jeezy)
The sonic arc here is towards things increasingly light and airy-sounding–like a dance mix that gets less aggressive as the night goes on. We’re kinda in like 1999 Jay Z land here and that’s a good thing. It also compartmentalizes the production to some extent, with the non-Kanye and No I.D beats sorta lumped together. A track like “Young Forever” is a real head-scratcher but it shares some open-space with “Real As It Gets” and both sound maudlin but victorious–an alright description of BP3 as a whole.

Tracks 13-15: One of the ideas is that these “suites” I’ve developed overlap a bit, like the “future synth” part is hinted at with “On to the Next One” and established on “Off That” and here, these final three tracks, particularly melodic funhouse mirror Vegas-sounding songs all heavy on legacy-talk, first rumbles in with “Real As It Gets”.

13. “So Ambitious” (featuring Pharrell)
14. “What We Talkin’ About” (featuring Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun)
Yeah, this songs works, like he’s finally mastered some sound he’s got in his head that failed miserably in the form of “Beach Chair”, and waited until the end–but not the very end–to address hopeless clowns like Jaz-O and Dame Dash. All the stuff about how carrying a strap and worrying one’s moms becomes damned affecting and sincere advice here because it has the album’s experiences behind it now–it’s not just Jay grabbing at anything to dominate the street dudes he long-ago ditched.

Coming after “So Ambitious” which once again highlights Jay’s self-mythologized entry into this rap shit and before “A Star is Born”, the track that recounts rap mythology as a whole and wrestles with the pool of new talent that simply by existing, moves Jay to the side, lightens the obnoxious aspects of the song and sorta justifies his confused contempt.

15. “A Star Is Born” (featuring J. Cole)
There’s something deeply cynical about this song, Jay casually recounting rap history almost as if he’s all above it and implicitly making the point that he’s still around (and a star) and they…aren’t. At the same time though, he’s just as implicitly saying, this stuff’s moving on. It touches on the tensions of the entire album, has enough joy and melancholy in there, and just has the feeling of a wrap-up, like a “shit sorta evens out” Wes Anderson type conclusion and not the denial of everything that is the real album-ender, “Forever Young”.

And then, handing the track over to a relevative newcomer, J. Cole is a quiet sign of confidence, the kind of do, not show, thing Jay Z once mastered. Remember how “Encore” came on toward the beginning of Black Album and you were like, “Why the fuck isn’t this the final track of his (then at least) final album?”. Well, same thing with this.

further reading/viewing:
-”Late Registration Redux” by ME
-”Trimming the Fat: Ruff Draft & Detroit Deli by ME
-Fade to Black (2004) directed by Pat Paulson & Michael John Warren
-Eureka (1983) directed by Nicolas Roeg

Written by Brandon

September 1st, 2009 at 5:28 pm

Posted in Jay-Z, Redux

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