Review of Jay-Z's "The Blueprint 3".
By turboman 19 Comments
Jay Z
The past ten years of Jay-Z's career has been hit or miss. We have the best out of Hove with 2007's "American Gangster" and Jay-Z's first retirement album "The Black Album". The latter of the two might as well be more known for the future "Gray Album" by DJ DangerMouse, but that's a different story. We have also seen Jay-Z's worst with "Kingdom Come" and All of the collaboration albums with R Kelly. The Blueprint 3 is Jay-Z's latest attempt and falls somewhere in between his best work and his worst work. It's nothing to pass off, as it defaults to one of the best hip-hop albums of the year, but it's nothing that anyone should get to excited over either.
In the Giant Bomb panel at PAX, Alex argued about how hard it is to write about a mediocre product, and that's just what this is. Jay-Z lead sing, DoA(Death of Autotune) is so brilliant and ferocious at the third track of the album, he never has the true ability to follow it up with anything. Run This Town immediately follows DoA, and while you can definitely enjoy the rest of the album on the first couple of listens throughout the CD, it gets stale really quick, on each listen, you eliminate songs in the rotation each time, untill your down to about three or four songs.
It's not flat out terrible songs, they just don't have anything to new to offer or say. Most of the worse tracks also will tend to feature some unknown rapper(at least to me), and it just seems like filling time up on the CD to make it longer. Young Jeezy is the opposite of what I like in a rap song, so I might be a tad bit biased here, but Young Jeezy can seriously piss off. All of the beats are slightly amusing, but nothing compared to Jay-Z's back catalog. One beat had potential by Swizz Beats on the song "On To The Next One", when I read that it was sampled from Justices "D.A.N.C.E.", I imagined the song to be fun not unlike "It's a Hard Knock Life", but the song ultimately disappoints by being dark and meaningless. Another lowpoint of the CD is "Venus vs. Mars". Try not to feel a little embarrassed that this song was made by Jay-Z. Ludacris will usually stoop this low in sexual song writing, but it's really weird hearing it come out of Jay's mouth, with the chorus being "(Girl) Daddy get it in, (Jay) Baby go hard" over and over. The song is just dirty and filthy, it's really awkward to listen to.
There are a few standouts to point out on the Blueprint 3. DoA obviously being the biggest. DoA is just four minutes of Jay-Z trying to save Hip-Hop, while also taking a couple of stabs at Scene rockers in one line. A Star Is Born might be a controversial pick, cause I can see people hating it, but I love that song for some reason. The song is about Jay-Z justifying why he is one of the greatest rappers today by naming rappers of the past, and how they didn't survive, but Jay did. The last of the greats can also be Hate-able(irony), the song is called Hate. While I'm on this subject, the best thing for Jay to remain fresh, and for Kanye to regain some fans back after his shenanigans at the VMA's would be if Jay-Z and Kanye released some kind of collaboration album. Hearing them rap off of each other(with albeit, ridiculously dumb rap patterns) is very fun to listen to.
Overall, Jay-z disappoints with the Blueprint 3. He raps about moving the genre forward, but doesn't back it up with any legitimately game changing songs. Everything seems pretty tacked on, despite the hype of hearing something different(Hey, what happened to that MGMT song, by the way?). A couple of years ago, he made a CD that he said he would retire on. After hearing Blueprint 3, it could be time for Jay-z to hang up his Yankees hat and focus on running his label behind the desk, not in front.
Recommended Downloads:
Death of Autotune
Run This Town
A Star is Born
Hate