a grammar

watch the throne, reviewed

Watch the Throne is about something more interesting than it’s getting credit for — so I wish it were better than just a “good” album.

Also, Kanye is really tiresome on it. Most of my commentary on Kanye was editorially excised from the Vulture review linked above, on the grounds that readers probably already know Kanye’s tiresome, but maybe you’ll enjoy some first-draft outtakes:

With great wealth and success, with such rarefied air filling one’s lungs, comes vague existential unrest, or at least cool and exciting new stuff to be self-pitying about.
West continues to sound like some moody hip-hop emperor, stalking around the crumbling gilded palace of his own head, muttering angrily and getting aggressive with the help. It’s never entirely clear why the palace is so crumbly, because he hasn’t bothered to look out the window lately. His focus remains on being a great shopper and the question of whether people like him. (He thinks not; last summer he said he was treated like Emmett Till, this summer Hitler. My victory garden is coming along nicely, by the way.) And women are involved, though for West that falls into the more debauched end of the “shopping” category. Women are cataloged as luxury goods, and thus expected to market and advertise themselves, and offer free samples, in an effort to get purchased or collected and share in all that aforementioned wealth and power. That isn’t me doing a feminist reading or anything; he actually says “meet me in the bathroom stall / and show me you deserve to have it all.”
What’s ironic is that West is super-good at making “having it all” sound just awful. Listening to him these days can leave you feeling comfortably ordinary, in about the same way you watch an action movie and are impressed and envirous of the hero, but ultimately glad you never have to rescue your kidnapped daughter from terrorists. On “New Day,” in fact, West says he’ll teach his hypothetical son not to do anything he did, so said son can have “an easy life.” (Also, not to go to strip clubs, because Kanye “found out the hard way” that they’re a poor place to shop for love. I like to pretend “the hard way” means “watching Entourage.”)
On “New Day,” Jay-Z actually imagines what it’d be like to be his kid; Kanye just imagines what it’s like to be himself.