With The Documentary, the Game proved that a thoroughly mediocre rapper can make a great rap album, given the right guests and producers. Memphis Bleek is, like Game, a derivative, artless MC with enormous resources, but he doesn't have a great album in him. Memphis Bleek has released four forgettable albums on Roc-A-Fella records while stronger artists like M.O.P. and Ol' Dirty Bastard moldered on the shelf. His greatest track and only hit remains "Is That Yo Bitch?", a song Jay-Z scrapped from his Vol. 3 album, and one that features Jigga and Missy Elliott in starring roles. Bleek has never gone platinum, and he probably never will. And yet Jay keeps him around. That's loyalty for you.
Bleek has stood onstage for Jay for nearly a decade without ever absorbing any of his mentor's effortless, swaggering elan or thoughtful, melancholy eloquence. He has a harsh, urgent, forceful flow; it's good for guest verses on battle-rap posse tracks, but it wears thin over the course of a single song, let alone an album. 534 features A-list producers such as Just Blaze and 9th Wonder, but Bleek rarely holds up his part of the track. His voice sounds OK over the exploding drums and surging horns of Swizz Beatz' club banger "Like That", but he derails the track with his staggeringly lame party-rap lyrics ("Slow motion for me, like ya ass was screwed up / Make you move like The Matrix when dude was ducking slugs/ Bleek the Black Sheep, mami, now pick it up"). On a sweeping, cinematic track like 9th Wonder's "Alright", he's just bizarrely terrible ("Don't confuse M with none of the bullshit/ To the streets I'm tied like my mama's tubes is"). On an already lame track like Demi-Doc and Irv Gotti's tinkly, watery thug-love snoozer "Infatuated", he falls even flatter, failing to project even the slightest hint of affection. He doesn't switch his flow up once over the course of the album, and he can't write a hook.
Only a few tracks on 534 play to Bleek's strengths. He's happiest spitting gutter battle stuff, and he sounds best when he has better rappers to play off of, and that's exactly what he gets on "First, Last and Only", sandwiched between berserk gun-talk of Lil Fame and Billy Danze of M.O.P. And along with his new protégé Livin' Proof, he murders Chad Hamilton's rippling old-school bounce track on "Get Low". (Proof has a greasy, desperate side-of-the-mouth delivery, and it's depressing to contemplate the possibility that Memphis Bleek may be the first rapper to be overshadowed by both his mentor and his protégé.) But 534's best track is "Dear Summer", wherein Jay-Z calmly and gracefully bids farewell to his favorite time of year over Just Blaze's dusty, Madlib-influenced lope. "Like all good things, we must come to an end/ Please show the same love to my friends," Jay pleads at the end of the track. Jay wants Bleek to succeed, and he usually gets what he wants, but the best thing about "Dear Summer" is that Bleek is nowhere to be found.
