Music Review: Jay-Z, “The Blueprint 3″
Rating: 78
Few raise their own stakes quite like Jay-Z: by calling the third disc since his truncated retirement “The Blueprint 3,” hip-hop’s most powerful player sets the bar high and asks listeners to compare his latest work to his greatest work. While “Blueprint 3” is not nearly as great as 2001′s “The Blueprint,” it has several standouts that justify the title and serves as a nexus point for Jay-Z’s street-born ethos and his high-gloss rap-pop, both of which provide excellent settings for the master’s lyrical flow.
Against a blaze of disco beats and synth washes courtesy of producer Kanye West, Jay-Z directs inward with a litany of his starring roles in media moments in “What We Talkin’ About” and a stunning and hard-as-nails glorification of himself and condemnation of competitors in “Thank You.” And like most legends, Jay-Z is a bundle of contradictions, taking aim at T-Pain collaborators in “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” but indulging in it immediately afterward with “Run This Town,” featuring West and Rihanna.
Such dichotomies recur constantly: Jay-Z delivers raw and awesome couplets on the hard-edged “On to the Next One,” recalling the rapper in his hungry, incendiary 20s, but “Empire State of Mind” is Shawn Carter as “the new Sinatra,” the king of New York. It’s a soaring travelogue of the five boroughs featuring Alicia Keys on the instant-classic chorus. That pop majesty has an unsatisfying flip side: the finale “Young Forever” is built on the Alphaville synth-pop weeper “Forever Young.” Comparatively speaking, Jay-Z is an elder statesman in a young man’s game, closing in on 40 but sounding thoroughly vital … until this track. A sure sign of insecurity about aging for this rapper is insisting that time doesn’t pass for him. But for the balance of “The Blueprint 3,” this mogul sounds practically ageless.
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