Rapping is easy; releasing records is hard. This is the melancholy truth that emerges from Jadakiss' third tepid and unfocused solo record in eight years. As a rapper, Jada's bona fides are firmly in place-- both Eminem and Q-Tip have named him to their top 10 of all time-- but when it comes to releasing albums, his batting average is only slightly higher than Saigon's. If his long, tortuous, and uneventful solo career is any indication, the ability to spit a hot sixteen-- or even hundreds upon hundreds of them– is nothing compared to the grit and determination it takes to face down a roomful of record execs, because The Last Kiss, even more than his previous two records, is exactly the sort of nothing-for-everyone platter that results from too many greedy, insecure hands in the pot.
To be fair, Jada is just as likely complicit the anonymous mess that is The Last Kiss as anyone. He's painfully ill-suited for the spotlight, but he can't seem to shake his confused thirst for superstardom and the big royalty checks it is supposed to bring, which is probably part of the reason why The Last Kiss comes equipped with two versions of "the Pharrell song," ("Stress Ya"and "Rockin With the Best") the first sounding like a bleepy retread of "Can I Have It Like That?" and the second sporting the kind of lounge-R&B cheese Pharrell was peddling to Snoop in 2006 (think "Let's Get Blown.") It's why DJ Khaled's screaming neon synthesizers strafe across a song called "Grind Hard", which is saddled with perhaps the most limp, unmemorable hook Mary J. Blige has ever been paid to sing. And it's the reason he's droning "Go baby, you're so wavy/ I ain't never felt this way about no lady" over Eric Hudson's poor-man's-Rodney-Jerkins back beat on "By My Side" alongside Ne-Yo.
The problem is, and has always been, that Jadakiss just has no commercial instincts; he has only the vaguest idea of what a "hit"sounds like, and reliably associates "slick and expensive-sounding" with "a sure thing." Even worse, his bars on the street cuts, his traditional area of strength, have turned slack and rote. "Guns gon' clap, packs gon' move/blood get drawn, skin gon'bruise/the real gon' win, the fake gon' lose," he raps on "Who's Real", over a tinny Swizz Beatz beat. And after 10 years or so of not making it big, his boasts are starting to sound oddly deflated: "I'm one of the best in the world, ma, that's what they say on the blogs" is apparently what passes for a Jadakiss pick-up line these days.
Jada's too talented to produce a completely worthless album, of course, and there are the usual one or two frustrating glimmers of the promise that keep getting him record deals. "One More Step" is a reliably satisfying back-and-forth with Styles P; "Cartel Gathering" features Ghostface and Raekwon, which is categorically never a bad thing. On "Death Wish", the Lil Wayne collaboration that leaked about a month ago, Jadakiss finally narrows his eyes and focuses, and his verse leaves a smoking crater that not even a relatively on-fire Wayne can fill. "What If?", meanwhile, coasts along on a nice 80s-R&B sample, even though it is a bald retread of "Why?", his only hit and still the best song of his solo career, and even though guest rapper Nas takes the "provocative question" formula straight into tinfoil-hat territory: "What if Hillary and them was reptilian?/ And 2012 was the end of men and all world civilians?" Yeah-- think about that.
The best song by far, though, is "Things I Been Through", a bite of Luther Vandross's "Promise" that reflects with startling honesty on Jada's endless struggles to maintain a toehold in the rap industry. With genuine affection in his voice, he reminisces about traveling with Puffy on the No Way Out tour: "Videotaped it all, I still watch it now/traveled around the world, learned how to rock a crowd." He sums up his career ups and downs with a judgment as poignant as it is succinct: "It ain't much, but it beats poor." Maybe he should take this advice and run with it: KOCH might not be Def Jam, and Jadakiss will probably never be the next big thing, but at least that label would let him put out records, and he probably wouldn't even have to include a Ne-Yo collaboration.
