Look at each artist’s 2013 output – Yeezy’s shit-is-bananas ‘Yeezus’ ( Clash review) and the aforementioned ‘Magna Carta…’ – and the more creatively ambitious collection is pretty obvious. His own star was ascending, and rapidly too – ‘The College Dropout’ would beat ‘The Black Album’ to a Grammy in 2004. ‘Lucifer’ is his only production credit on ‘The Black Album’, having chalked up five on 2001’s ‘The Blueprint’ and another three on that album’s next-year sequel. In 2003, Kayne West was adding the final touches to his own debut album, ‘The College Dropout’. Its hit rate is impressive: ‘What More Can I Say’ flows into ‘Encore’ the Eminem-helmed ‘Moment Of Clarity’ is a dramatic biographical adventure through Jay’s passage to his superstar present and the Kanye-produced ‘Lucifer’ rides Max Romeo’s ‘Chase The Devil’ like the Upsetters-backed original was crafted exclusively for this use.Īnd it’s ‘Lucifer’ that marks a very key moment in modern rap’s history: the moment where the student became the master. Listen to ‘The Black Album’ today and it’s still brilliant. His full-length Kayne collaboration, 2011’s ‘Watch The Throne’, came out as a decidedly scattershot experience: even at 46 minutes it felt too long, forgettable collaborations with La Roux’s Elly Jackson and Swizz Beatz sagging the record’s mid-section, taking the shine off early highs like the breathless ‘N****s In Paris’ and the Frank Ocean-featuring ‘No Church In The Wild’. We saw it coming, though – nothing since ‘The Black Album’ has had the same passion to it, the same meticulous quality control.Ģ009’s ‘The Blueprint 3’ traded its makers streetwise roots for the maximum mainstream reach possible, the end result a smorgasbord of sound-alike pop-rap makeweights. Jay’s is a slide that’s dipped so low that the most interesting aspect of 2013’s tired-sounding ‘Magna Carta… Holy Grail’ LP ( Clash review) is that it was released in conjunction with a smartphone and accompanying app. But ‘Kingdom Come’ marks the beginning of a slide from critical acclaim a slide that ensures that ‘The Black Album’ remains his greatest on-record achievement. Until the golf got boring, anyway: just three years after ‘The Black Album’, almost to the day, Jigga’s ninth album, his ‘comeback’, was released. From the studio to the 18 th hole, time was right for a change. The final track here, ‘My 1 st Song’, is just the end credits for a career: “I’m about to go golfin’,” he says. He assembled a production entourage that, today, would cost an impossible amount of money to bring together: Timbaland, 9 th Wonder, Eminem, Just Blaze, Rick Rubin, DJ Quik, Kanye West, The Neptunes… Nobody big, then. Jigga was at the peak of his powers, flowing prose with a palpable confidence – throughout, he inflates his own ego to incredible proportions while offering influential credit where it’s due, via samples, to Run-D.M.C., Biggie and UGK. ‘The Black Album’ was intended as the end, so it pulled no punches. But it’s Carter’s expert management of these situations that got him to the point, in 2003, where he’d achieved enough to split from spitting. He’s benefitted from timely associations – from Big Daddy Kane to Foxy Brown, Kanye West to Pharrell Williams – and publicity-piquing feuds in his time: a pathetic spat with Nas stands out. Like The Notorious B.I.G., RZA and so many more talents to emerge in the early-to-mid 1990s, he cast aside a criminal past to make good with his music, ultimately taking it to the global stage. But few of the man’s (once-) peer-level MCs successfully spread themselves across so many commercial avenues with such incredible success.
The “best rapper alive”? The “motherf*cking greatest”? Hardly. Look back at the last decade’s roster of hip-hop heavyweights and its maker, Brooklyn bad boy turned multimedia entrepreneur Shawn Carter, stands proud as a legitimate kingpin. ‘The Black Album’, released on November 14th, 2003, still matters.
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