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…So Far, On the Blueprint III

….So far, on the Blueprint III…

…“And I don’t wear Jerseys I’m thirty plus, give me a crisp pair of jeans nigga button-ups”...I’m sure Jay-Z didn’t expect every young hip hop fan to throw out his $200 George Gervin throwback and go to Bloomingdales and pick up a closet full of button ups, but they did. We did. We listened to Jay like he was the headmaster at a boarding school. The only thing was he really wasn’t trying to convince us. He was merely telling us what he did and thought was fly. But with the official release of Death of Auto Tune and Run This Town along with the unofficial leak of Off That featuring Drake off of the highly anticipated Blueprint III album, it seems as though he is now telling us what to do.

Everything evolves, and musically the last two years in Hip Hop have been considerably evolutionary. The Hip Hop scene moved out of New York and into South. The revolutionary but gangster rappers like Public Enemy and NWA were replaced with the more lyrically conscious sounds of the Native Tongues Era. They in turn were followed by very urban/mainstream fusions for a long span that became redundant and sparked the recent uprising of more conscious positive minded acts. These processes are organic and necessary.

With the Death of Auto Tune, Jay is saying very simply, stop listening to auto tune. No subliminal here, it’s very overt. We all know the use of auto tune, although somewhat criticized has been very successful in recent times. It’s built the careers of T-Pain, Ron Brownz and others not to mention that Kanye West recorded his iconoclastic genre breaking album 808 and Heartbreak in complete auto tune and received critical acclaim. DOA seems to have had an invisible “gag order” on the use of auto tune. What was once a musical “Do” in 2007/2008, became an immediate musical “Don’t” in 2009. Should one man have this much power? Run This Town screams, “Look at me, look at me”. He’s Jay. He doesn’t have to tell us that he runs the town. We are all well aware of his relevance and accomplishments. But after your lead single bashes the “In thing” of 2008 and you second single screams “I run this”, eye brows can only begin to raise.

The single Off That is a very dope record. In fact all the songs are great musically. But what is he saying? “Cris we off that, Timbs we off that, rims we off that” Poking fun at lifestyle “don’ts”, almost purposely showing us how powerful he is when the domestic sale of rims, Timbs, and Cristal drop next quarter. Because Jay is so methodical and purposeful with his music you have no choice but to pay close attention to all of this. The point that remains is, if these observations are true, why does Jay feel the need to try and exercise his influence on Hip Hop culture? He used to put people in a frenzy by unconsciously saying things that navigated the direction of Hip Hop. But now it seems forced.  Isn’t Jay above an industry wide diss record or another song telling us how much money he has or how powerful he is? Content aside, the songs are all pretty dope and we look forward to the album.