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Compesh is a question and answer (and debate) website, so before you make a debate, you better learn what an assertion is. I suppose you already know what a question is, and that you've typed it in the box. ;)
An assertion, is basically a statement you can make, that is either true or false.
Richer people have better health.
The question for that would be, Do richer people have better health?
And don't forget to make your assertion, match your question.
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Listening to the Watch The Throne, and its first track No Church In The Wild, with its distorted and filtered guitar riff and string stabs, it gets off to a promising start. It feels like an album that can get somewhere good. That excitement soon stops. With that track, as soon as the break comes in where the low pass filter is used and auto-tuned singing happens, it's evident that this will be Jay Z's attempt to create an album like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It's the first Kanye West song I've ever heard that uses conventions from dance music, more specifically house music.
There are some tracks on the album that make me ask What the hell am I listening to? It's Jay Z and Kanye West. Where are the lyrics? Where's the clever word play and humour we know them for? Tracks I'm talking about that include lazy or non-existent lyrics are Lift Off, New Day, Made In America, Why I Love You, and Illest Motherfucker Alive. Although they have rapping in them, they do not feel like rap songs. They feel more like conceptual songs. It feels like Jay Z said to Kanye, I want you to make beats that remind me of going to space, swimming underwater, and winning an Olympic race.
Watch The Throne does not feel like a Jay Z or Kanye West album at all. It feels like a side project like Gorillaz, Stone Sour or Lil Wayne's Rebirth. It doesn't feel like either Kanye West or Jay Z made the album, putting their voices aside if you listen.
The problem and reason for this departure of the usual sound, is that Jay Z wants to stay current. Jay Z is the biggest rapper in the world, and the student has unfortunately surpassed his master. Unfortunately for Jay Z that is. Although Jay Z is the biggest rapper in the world, it is Kanye West who gets all the hype and buzz. Watch The Throne is an attempt to go experimental and allow Jay Z to get the acclaim and widespread adoption that Kanye West has. Kanye has critical acclaim for all his albums, and his music is listened to people of broad music tastes. Jay, not so much; hence the reason for this album.
This album should be renamed to Reclaim the Relevance or Reclaim the Acclaim. Watch The Throne is Jay Z's attempt to stay relevant today, re-invent himself, and become critically acclaimed.
We all know what happens to people who try to be original for the sake of being original. The creations suck. Because of this, lots of the music in the album makes no sense. Otis, one of the best songs of the album, starts out with a soul sample with Otis Redding singing, and then when the beat drops, the vocals are sliced up to make a danceable 808 drum pattern beat of which the vocal slices are interwoven with the drums. It sounds so soulful don't you agree?, says Jay Z before the beat drops. Soulful? It's nothing of the sort. Lift Off makes no sense as it sounds like a Beyonce song featuring rappers.
It's also ironic that the album makes use of auto-tune as Jay Z has a song called Death of Autotune.
The album performs best when the beats don't try to be futuristic and pull off the traditional hip hop sound that we're used to. When the album tries to change the landscape of music with tracks like Welcome to the Jungle, New Day, Who Gon Stop Me; the album fails as it loses its sense of direction and purpose.
It's a shame that the most hip hop sounding songs on the album, are the best ones. It would be great if Otis, Gotta Have It, That's My Bitch, and HAM, had more similar songs that would stand by them, in the tracklisting.
Sometimes the experimentation works, as it does with No Church In The Wild, New Day, and Primetime; but if the album was tilted to the opposite direction to include more hip hop sounding songs, the album would have been immensively impressive. Jay Z and Kanye West have let us down, as their consistently clever lyrics are non-existent. I wish that Jay Z could have made a Watch The Throne album to follow his heart, not make a Reclaim The Relevance album, by having songs with auto-tune, MBDTF inspired beats, and songs with cinematic instrumentals. I can see this album being featured in movie soundtracks, not people's cars as they drive by.