'Watch The Throne' has everyone buzzing. Everything from the album not leaking, to the volume of units reportedly sold without a real lead-in radio tune.
Kind of looked over in all the hoopla was whether or not the album actually lived up to it's lofty billing.
Check out a few reviews from critics coast to coast, and see if you agree.
Chicago Tribune: When two of the biggest names in hip-hop – Jay-Z and Kanye West -- collaborate on an album, is there any way it can live up to the hype? Likely not, and that’s the burden “Watch the Throne” faces. 2/4
USA Today: Star collaborations don’t always work out as well in practice as they do on paper (see: Jay-Z and R. Kelly). But in this case, they’ve created an artistic Throne that other rappers can aspire to. 4/4
AllHipHop: The Neptunes-produced “Gotta Have It” is pleasant, but the real gem is “New Day,” a song Jay and Kanye pen to their fictional unborn sons. It shows both as vulnerable and honest, backed by RZA and Kanye’s production. Kanye starts, “And I’d never let my son have an ego, we gon, be nice to everyone wherever we go / I mean I might even make him be Republican, so everybody know he love white people.” Jay vows to his son, ”Promise to never leave him even if his momma tweaking / Cause my Dad left me and I promised never repeat him.” 9/10
L.A. Times: Over the course of the album, West and Hova name-check with cultural equanimity, shouting out both Too Short and Larry Gagosian, bragging on their Rothkos and Basquiats, offering a nod “to the leader of the Jackson 5,” to Dale Earnhardt, Plato and Malcolm X. Interwoven are brand-name endorsements of Hermes, Audemars Piguet, Margiela and Gucci.
Huffington Post: These verses aren't aspirational, they're autobiographical. West's mother passed away in Los Angeles from complications from cosmetic surgery. Jay-Z can't give an interview without being asked when him and Beyonce are planning on fathering a child (in a recent surprise Hot 97 interview, he said he was "looking for the exits" as soon as Angie Martinez asked him when he wants to be dad). In an age of "I love you, love me" synth pop of Ladies Gaga, Spears and Perry, listening to Watch The Throne feels like coming off of happy pills and realizing that it's OK that sometimes, life doesn't just love you the way you were born.
New York Post : Watch the Throne” is neither West’s nor Jay-Z’s best, but count it as a success, especially getting two performers as dynamic and egomaniacal as this duo to mesh into a cohesive team.
TIME: But dig deep into Throne, past the bacchanal celebration of the finer things in life, and you'll find the album's heart: two men grappling with what it means to be successful and black in a nation that still thinks of them as second class.
The finest example of this is "Murder to Excellence," which compares the murder rate in Chicago to the death toll in Iraq. Jay-Z raps about Black Panther member Fred Hampton, killed in a police raid in 1969, and about Danroy Henry, a 20-year-old Pace University student who was shot outside a Pleasantville, NY bar by police in October 2010. "Is it genocide?" Kanye muses, "Cause I can still hear his mama cry." The song isn't angry and it isn't accusatory. It just seeks to catalog what's happening in urban communities ("The paper read murder / black-on-black murder" runs the chorus) and to understand why it seems like the violence will never stop.
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