'Watch the Throne' Album Review
Jay-Z and Kanye West’s 2011
collaborative work, Watch the Throne
debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling 436,000 copies its
first week. It is Jay-Z’s 12th number one album in the United States
and the fifth for West. With songs produced by West and emceed by both men, the
album is diverse and its content varied.
Standout tracks from the album are songs like “Otis,” “New Day,” “Murder
to Excellence” and “Made in America.” Each is full with social commentary as
told through scenarios in both rappers’ lives.
The lyrics are laid over lush
production and Jay and ‘Ye’s tag-team rhymes provide contrasting accounts of
shared experiences. Watch the Throne
is also aggressively ostentatious with references to esoteric art, luxury cars
and expensive vacations. Riccardo Tisci
of the French fashion house Givency even designed the album’s cover artwork, an
image of gilded, ornate embroidery. All of this considered, in combination with
the warning implicit in its title, contributes to Watch the Throne as the most subversive Hip Hop album of the past
20 years.
Watch the Throne is a thesis on
what success means for Black men in America. What Kanye and Jay have to say
extremely valuable, as is how they
say it.
Otis,” the first single from
the album was instrumental to its promotion and branding. It is named for Otis
Redding, whom it samples throughout. The seemingly unrelated use of Redding’s voice
from “Try A Little Tenderness” over lyrics about materialism becomes more
appropriate with an understanding of Redding’s contribution to the legacy of
Blacks in the music industry (Redding having been one of few Black singers to
maintain publishing rights for the hit songs he wrote.) His example is in line
with the entrepreneurship that made Jay-Z and Kanye West millionaires. At one
point in the song, Jay-Z boasts, “Driving Benzes, wit' no benefits / Not bad
huh? / For some immigrants / Build your fences, we diggin' tunnels / Can't you
see? We gettin' money up under you.”
The video for the “Otis” is set
in an empty freight rail yard where the only props are an American flag mural
and a deconstructed Maybach, the German luxury automobile valued at $350,000. The video opens with Jay-Z and Kanye
approaching the beautiful car menacingly with a power saw and welding torch in
their hands. They mock and endorse symbols of the American dream for over three
minutes, speeding through the rails yard in the mangled Maybach with beautiful
women in the backseat. The last frame is a message stating that proceeds from
the auction of the car will go to East African drought disaster relief.
“New Day” samples another
strong figure within Black music: Nina Simone. It samples the first few lines
of vocal from her “Feeling Good.” The song walks the line between introspection
and melancholy as West and Jay-Z lament personal decisions veiled as advice to
their prospective children. On this song, Kanye takes highly publicized events
from his own life and examines them in a powerful display of identity
negotiation. He rhymes, “And I’ll never let my son have an ego / He’ll be nice
to everyone, wherever we go / I mean I might even make him be Republican / So
everybody know he love white people”
Those lines, partly facetious,
show West’s awareness of his image within media and popular culture. For
actions like his speaking out against former president George W. Bush in
response to the devastation of Hurrican Katrina and interrupting an MTV awards
show, he has been labeled an egomaniac and crazy. In the above lyric, West seems to make a
connection between the criticism he has received and the fact that he is a
Black man. He challenges his image as a belligerent black man and what suspects
to be its root. He continues, “And I’ll never let him ever hit the telethon / I
mean even if people dyin’ and the world ends / See, I just want him to have an
easy life / Not like Yeezy life, just want him to be someone people like.”
By far the song with the
richest social commentary on Watch the
Throne is “Murder to Excellence.” It parallels the opulent lifestyles of
Jay-Z and West with those of young, Black men living in America’s cities. West
looks to his hometown Chicago, calling it the “murder capital” while Jay-Z
opens the song with a tribute to Danroy Henry, a Pace University student killed
by the police in New York.
If not expressed explicitly,
Jay-Z subtly connects his condition to that of young Black men around the
country. Here, he is reorienting the listener’s expectation of him; wealthy,
famous and powerful through connection to people like Danroy Henry. Jay-Z
affirms his connection to community through a shared vulnerability to police
brutality and other random violence when rhymes “I’m out here celebrating my
post-demise.” In a very complex way, the comment calls out the expectation of
destruction that plagues Black men and the extreme deviation of Jay-Z’s life
from it. He uses both to justify his lifestyle.
That seems to be he point of Watch the Throne. Jay-Z and Kanye
represent something that makes America nervous and excited all at the same
time. They’re either in on the joke or they are it, a prospect so complex it
produces 12 tracks that sound like therapy sessions put on wax. It’s full of
rich people problems. Ripe with black people problems. W. E. B. Du Bois might
have called it double consciousness, a phenomenon he described in his landmark
book “The Souls of Black Folk” when he wrote “One ever feels his twoness - an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two reconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from
being torn asunder.”