Who's been responsible for The Blueprint 3's biggest PR boost thus far: Kanye West or Rihanna? Timbaland or Drake? Um, LeBron James? According to our RSS, the answer would appear to be Ed Droste. Now, a few years ago, a YouTube of Jay-Z swaying lazily to "Ready, Able" might've been a "gotcha" moment worthy of the Summer Jam Screen, but in 2009, the buzz it's generated is either a huge breakthrough for the hip-hop/indie conversation or a sign that seeing Jigga in the same room as Grizzly Bear is more exciting than hearing him on the same song as any of the all-stars that populate The Blueprint 3: After all, The Blueprint 3 is so certainly Jay-Z's weakest solo album, you'll be tempted to wonder if Kingdom Come was somehow underrated.
While "30 Something" and "Beach Chair" might stand as some of the most smug hip-hop ever committed to tape, they at least came from a real place, which illustrated the "curse" Jay so often speaks of: Nearly all of his LP's are concept albums about the state of his career, but in the 21st century, he's needed some sort of external boost to make it work, whether it's announcing his dominance of New York, his retirement, or the ability to play fast and loose with Frank Lucas' biography. Maybe it's just the timing, but like any recent MTV VMA's, Blueprint 3 generates its event-ness from a stubborn belief in its own ability to be an event. As such, most of it finds Jay-Z dealing in contradictory impulses-- to remind listeners of his unparalleled success in the rap game, but just as often, imploring everyone to stop thinking about his unparalleled success and get on some ill-defined "next shit."
Honest question-- did Kanye West pull an inside job on Big Brother here? I mean, he gets all the good lines on "Run This Town" and getting Jay to follow his punchdrunk, slouchy flow on "Hate" has to be the result of some bar bet. But it isn't a matter of Kanye fronting him bad beats as much as a state of mind, the sort of maniacal need for approval that often humanizes Kanye but just makes Jay-Z sound insecure and whiny (see: most of The Blueprint 2). "Niggas want my old shit/ Buy my old album," he sneers in "On to the Next One" over a hyperactive Swizz Beatz track that indicates Jay's not the only one trying to sum up his entire career within the span of four minutes. But "Thank You", "Reminder", and "So Ambitious" all go to great lengths to reiterate accomplishments that we've heard dozens of time, but without naming names, they ultimately feel toothless considering his detractors in 2009's rap game are almost incapable of being taken seriously.
But even as Jay attempts to flow futuristic on self-explanatory tracks like "Off That", "Already Home", and "A Star Is Born", he never allows any sort of torch-passing moments-- without the credits, you'd almost completely forget actual Future of Rap guys like J. Cole, Kid Cudi, and Drake even made it to the studio. The last of which is numbingly non-committal salutation to the past 10 years of hip-hop royalty with all the insight of an Encarta entry-- yeah, Eminem was a white guy and he still got respect. Those were the times, right?
We can wrangle with the moral implications of Jay-Z making a track like "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" when the very next song on Blueprint 3 has Rihanna (to say nothing of whoever's on the hook for "Reminder"), but the singles actually gain a sort of halo effect for their familiarity, or at least giving Jay some sort of topical construct. Elsewhere, there's just such a weird vibe-- Jay-Z still sounds like himself, but for someone whose lyrics become the lingua franca of the hip-hop community for months after any of his releases, he goes vast stretches of time without saying anything remotely memorable. He's in Kingdom Come autopilot here, "get me out of these 16 bars" clock-punching intermittently spiked with chuckle-worthy rich rapper rhetoric ("nowadays I eat quail/ I'll probably never see jail"), pulled-from-People namedrops ("no I'm not a Jonas," plus a Bernie Madoff reference that we won't get into), and a "downward dog" coke rap that even Clipse might think twice about.
Even stranger is how it invokes the title of the original Blueprint (not to mention an aborted attempt to opportunistically recall its release date), but bears no sonic resemblance to it at all. Timbaland clearly wasn't bringing his A-game here ("Reminder" and the dumbfounding "Venus vs. Mars" are phoned-in from his uninspired mid-decade valley), but the other big names, even Kanye, follow suit with the most middling futurism 2004 had to offer, or the kind of Vegas schmaltz that make all those Sinatra at the opera lines uncomfortably trenchant-- the piledriver hooks of "Run This Town" and "Empire State of Mind" are content to annoy their way to ubiquity, but the cheesed-out synths of "So Ambitious" clearly demonstrates the difference between "ft. Pharrell" and "produced by the Neptunes."
I guess we should've brought up "Young Forever" earlier, and the answer to your question is "Alphaville, not Rod Stewart," and done completely straight-faced by Mr. Hudson. So menopausal and trite that it makes "Beach Chair" sound like "Streets Is Watching", Jay-Z rounds out Blueprint 3 with a gaggle of self-help bromides-- "just a picture perfect day that lasts a whole lifetime/ And it never ends because all we have to do is hit rewind." It's only passable as next-level reverse psychology, inspiring a demand of another Jay-Z album in spite of how godawful Blueprint 3 is, just as long as "Young Forever" isn't the last song we hear from him.
But in the end, Jay-Z's probably right about his claim this year that hip-hop could learn a thing or two from indie rock, even if he's purposefully vague about what that actually means. Should rappers start booking studio time with, like, Nico Muhly? Well, there's always Late Registration. Talk a good game about making "experimental albums," like Jay's doing already? 808s & Heartbreak. Is Jay-Z really the kind of guy who should be telling rappers to think differently about building a fanbase when his only mixtape was created to sell a shoe? Because from its roster of producers and guest spots to its elaborate marketing, Blueprint 3 is the kind of stuck-on-stupid, event-driven money pit that proves while Jay-Z's at a point where he's got no one to answer to but himself, he's still capable of an entire hour of failing to take his own advice.
