Music Mixhap - Blueprint III

I've been long overdue for a music review, so why not?

When Jay-Z released The Black Album he said he was going to step away from the music industry and invest more time in his other business ventures. It was a shock for many and for the most part many people didn't really believe him. Some fell for the marketing ploy and the album went triple platinum. In the end he obviously didn't retire from the music biz; after all, he ended up releasing two other albums.

For the most part, I didn't pay attention to those albums (Kingdom Come, American Gangster). I guess they weren't well advertised. Well, not well advertised enough for me to actually discover them. I'm a busy person and for those who know me, I listen to a lil' bit of everything and it's hard to keep up to date with every new album coming out especially when I'm trying to look for some new upcoming artists to listen to. Different from his previous two albums, Jay-Z's Blueprint 3 has been over-advertised to death recently so I decided to have a listen. Does it live up to its hype and meet expectations or is it an over publicized piece of Plies poo-poo?

Anyhow, on with the review...

For the most part it's a very easy album to listen to. With most rappers, Jay-Z included, they will flood their album with collaborative works featuring other artists; thus it's very single-friendly too. Nowadays artists need to produce a single-heavy album in order to sell albums--a very smart business move by Jay-Z if anything. I'm completely okay with that since I'm a fan of collaborative work since it breaks up some monotony in albums out there.

There is a problem with albums like this though as your liking of the album will definitely depend on your liking of the featured artists on the individual tracks. Despite this problem, Jay-Z's fairly lyrically substantial verses are worth listening to. I enjoyed at least 3/4 of the album which is definitely worth listen-through for any Jay-Z fan. It's not an album that overachieves with gradeur, nor is it very revolutionary in any way; Jay-Z plays it safe this time around, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Notable Tracks:

• "Empire State of Mind" (feat. Alicia Keys)
• "Already Home" (feat. KiD CuDi)
• "Young Forever" (feat. Mr. Hudson)

Worth a Listen:

• "Real As It Gets" (feat. Young Jeezy)
• "D.O.A." (Death of Auto-Tune)
• "A Star is Born" (feat. J. Cole)
• "Thank You"

Meh: (Avoid)

• "Run This Town" (feat. Kanye West & Rihanna)
• "Hate" (feat. Kanye West)

Any tracks I didn't mention are fairly mediocre; perhaps worth listening to only once but could get some getting accustomed to. Some may disagree that Run This Town shouldn't be in the Meh column, but to be honest, I don't like Rihanna too much and the beat to the song is quite annoying. If you hear closely, it's a duck quacking over and over--nice one Jay-Z. Maybe this is why mainstream rap gets a bad rep sometimes.