12/29/2023 0 Comments Jay blueprint 3![]() Thank You boasts lush orchestration and a propulsive turn from the rapper: it doesn't exactly say a great deal, beyond confirming that it's nice to be enormously wealthy and inhabit a jet-setting world of international celebrity, but it does so pretty spectacularly. What We Talkin' About? sets Jay-Z's voice amid huge, enveloping synths and a strange, staccato, falsetto vocal from, of all people, Luke Steele, the eyeshadow-sporting Australian singer-songwriter behind the Sleepy Jackson and Empire of the Sun. If it's hard to feel like you're experiencing a musical event of vast significance when someone's trying to flog you a Private Body Fat Analyzer at the same time, Blueprint 3 goes out of its way to suggest you are, at least at first. Fat burning furnace cuts down 3lbs of your belly using one weird old tip. You just go to a website called, where all 15 tracks are hosted, alongside the kind of low-rent banner adverts you suspect no one ever clicks on: Click here to get debt help now. You don't have to travel to a secret location or sign a document swearing you to secrecy. But The Blueprint 3 certainly doesn't arrive in a particularly grand manner, at least if you're reviewing it. He could do with making a definitive musical statement to redress the balance, which is presumably why his latest album is named as a sequel to his most definitive musical statement of all: 2001's unequivocally fantastic The Blueprint. In 2009, he's more famous than ever, which is part of the problem: he's running the risk of becoming better known as a celebrity – married to Beyoncé, friends with Chris and Gwyneth, and, as he puts it, "a small part of the reason the president is black" – than a rapper. His albums Kingdom Come and American Gangster sold, but they didn't scale the artistic heights of his pre-retirement oeuvre. His vast wealth and success might suggest otherwise, but things haven't gone entirely according to plan since the former Shawn Carter decided he hadn't retired after all. "I'm doing better than before, why would I do that?" He sounds bullish – in fairness, Jay-Z always sounds bullish, timidity not getting one terribly far in the world of hip-hop – but there's a detectable defensiveness about that remark. "People talking about, Hova take it back," raps Jay-Z on his 11th studio album.
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