On Watch the Throne

- Watch the Throne: Starring Kanye West as himself and a luxury goods catalog as Jay-Z.

- Admittedly, Jay-Z's current "Selected Readings from My Credit Card Statement" rap style is strongly preferable to the cranky old man pathetically whinging about being "forever young" on The Blueprint 3, but it's still far from being any good. For one thing, the only people who will get half these brand-name references probably scoff at hip-hop as too bourgeois on their way to the opera anyway. It's worth noting that Jay's only good verse on the album name-checks nothing classier than Ballantine Ale and seed-heavy marijuana - "The Joy" comes from a place of heartfelt memory and actual connection to humanity, while the rest of his verses seem like tossed-off telegrams from some lonely Xanadu.

- Of course, it's not like you'd call Kanye relatable exactly, but when he goes on about his own obscene indulgence, he's always interesting - he's uniquely vivid ("Coke on her black skin make a stripe like a zebra/I call that jungle fever") or goofily clever ("Prince William ain't do it right if you ask me/Cuz if I was him I would have married Kate and Ashley") or just unpredictable in some way, which rarely happens with Jay here. Except for "New Day", Ye's verses here have him in not-trying-that-hard silly punchline mode, as opposed to Dark Twisted Fantasy's more reflective, thoughtful mode, but it mostly works in this context.

- That context is a pretty lightweight collection of beats, although a few are brilliant (the prog-rock stomp of "No Church in the Wild", RZA's shockingly successful autotuning of Nina Simone on "New Day"). A few of these suffer from that Blueprint 3 problem of wanting to be "futuristic", which translates in practice to lame retreads of last year's dance music model (dubstep samples are a bad idea as it is, but sampling Flux Pavilion only amplifies the problem). Judging from the beats Kanye actually made for himself, you can blame this one on Jay-Z entirely. When is he going to figure out that the future of hip-hop is going to be something much weirder than whatever music played at the club last night?

- This is not going to be good for Frank Ocean's career. It doesn't matter how much good will Frank gets out of his decent album-opening hook and his much-better-than-decent debut album - a large proportion of mainstream listeners will now remember him as that goofy guy who sang the insanely corny hook about the baby Jesus on "Made in America".

- "Lift Off" strikes me as one of the worst transparent stabs at a radio single I've ever heard. It's not just that Beyonce's hook is kind of bland - it's that with repetition of the hook alone she seems to sing twice as many words as the actual rappers on the track rap combined. Did they forget to finish this track? Was Bey going to make Jay sleep on the couch if anyone dared to upstage her mediocre contribution?

- Not to get all Upper East Side blue blood on him, but Jay's constant art-world namedropping (Basquiat! Rothko! A thousand goddamned mentions of the MOMA!) is so fucking nouveau-riche, isn't it?

- Andy was telling me that the terrible things about this album can be explained by thinking of the whole thing as a big old tongue-in-cheek Trapped-in-the-Closet self-parody. If you're willing to be that generous, that's not a terrible way to look at it, but if it's all a joke, I wish it was a funnier one!