Jay-Z and Kanye West: Watch the Throne

// August 13th, 2011 // No Comments » // Music

There’s something familiar about the latest co-album, “Watch the Throne,” by Kanye West and Jay-Z. It’s as though I’ve already heard this style of rap, this tone of voice, before; but never arranged in that sort of way. The first song off it comes out the gate running, though not bucking. It’s the combination of a heady bass riff with a trumpet-like synth which makes it original. Both retro and crisp, the song’s movement is like something you would hear in a movie – a car driving off into a sunset.

To be sure, most of those moments of ingenuity suspended over the album are captured in the lyrics of “No Church in the Wild.” Like a crystal shining under moonlight the song exhibits a kind of sympathy, a vibrant display, at first; its mechanization notwithstanding. And yet the rapper returns with a bleak reminder, a provocative blending of nostalgia with irony, that where desire rules, God is irrelevant; and the sympathy quickly flutters away. Hence, there is no church in the wild.

What’s a mob to a king?
What’s a king to a God?
What’s a God to a non-believer
Who don’t believe in anything?

Certainly the notion of being in the wild could relate to the way human beings are thought to desire. But can it explain the force of a desire of the non-believer? The answer becomes clear, I think, should we take that force to vary with the rungs of a ladder. To be a non-believer is, simply, to sit atop a ladder. Neither fighting dragons, defending Gods, nor enticing women; but protecting oneself, impiously, with an air of indifference – the anti-warrior à la Nasir Jones. Are Kanye West and Jay-Z ushering in a new style to the hip-hop scene? Check out the song “Who Gon Stop Me” and tell us what you think.

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Just keep running, like the little girl from Forrest Gump said. Maybe I can hide up there in the chicken coop. But the air – it’s so thick; and if I just had a moment’s breathe. And as you start to slow by the bridge, you hear the sound of the giant footsteps return. Panicked, you realize that you have no option but to jump. You take the plunge; but the giant follows. It’s a highway duel, and now, your only option is a dangerous one. You take the high road; and from that point on it was all adrenaline. And space was removed from time until the chase became a vacuum of thought and sound. Will the giant make his move, running away in laughter? Click to watch the animated short "Mac ‘n’ Cheese," directed and created by four students at the Utcretch School of Arts in the Netherlands.