Jay is Chillin’, ‘Ya Is Chillin’, What More Can I Say?

Jay-Z and Kanye West first teamed up when West produced Jay’s Izzo off the original Blueprint album and the decade long partnership saw West produce at least one track on all of Jay’s albums since while Jay has jumped on multiple of Kanye’s songs. This included four songs recorded for West’s recent My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, two that made the album, two relegated to the free G.O.O.D. Friday downloads on Kanye’s website.

The duo parlayed that output with a new group The Thone and the appropriately titled Watch the Throne album. If you forget the album title, do not worry, Kanye mentions it in about every other song. The collaboration continues that pattern of both rappers embracing indie rock, Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver), who was all over Fantasy contributes to one song on Throne. And it is also felt right off the bat with the menacing No Church in the Wild featuring an auto-tuned Frank Ocean, despite Jay declaring its death just two years ago. Ocean (no relation to Billy) also shows up for a heartfelt chorus on Made in America (which may or may not be a epilogue to West’s Who Will Survive in America that closed out his last album).

It is not all doom and gloom like their last solo albums; the duo goes old school, really old school, on Otis, which has less to do with the late singer than the pair trying to out-boast each other. Jay-Z starts things off by trying to convince us that he invented swag (a reanimated corpse of Frank Sinatra may have something to say about that) while Kanye thinks he is going to have a get out of hell free card because he performed Jesus Walks. Even with all that over the top braggadocios, the true star of the track remains the Otis Redding sample of Try a Little Tenderness that overshadows the two rappers and is automatically in the discussion of greatest use of a rap sample of all time. OF ALL TIME!!!

If Try a Little Tenderness is the best sample on the album, the weirdest goes to Will Ferrell, no, not Anchorman, or even Ricky Bobby, but (Expletive Deleted) in Paris lifts lines from the ice skating comedy Blades of Glory and Kanye places them over Dr. Dre style staccato beats. Really, the production is the all-star on the album. RZA flips Nina Simone’s Feeling Good into a haunting chorus on New Day. West and Q-Tip create some fuzzy drums out of the classic sample Apache from the Incredible Bongo Band for That’s My (Expletive Deleted) and is taken to another with a chorus from La Roux’s Elly Jackson. While Swizz Beats makes the most out of a weird “la la la” chant for Murder to Excellence. It is a shame the rapping does not live up to the production. Even the usually quoteworthy West seems to be overwhelmed to trade verses with his mentor Jay-Z who has been living mostly off of great production since his unretirement.

Song to Download – Otis

Watch the Throne gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.