Watch the Throne
Hua Hsu wrote the only Watch the Throne review that matters. Below is an excerpt, jump over to Grantland for a full review.
Let Them Eat Cake - Hua Hsu
Kanye West’s astonishing rise can be heard in his enunciation. His debut album, College Dropout, released in 2004, was an arriviste-rap triumph, full of the arch, exaggerated swagger of the fundamentally insecure. “I can’t even pronounce nothin’/Pass that Ver-say-see,” he crowed on “All Falls Down,” a young man fanning himself with cash for the first time, not knowing that this is the kind of thing you don’t do at a Versace flagship. But this sense of discovery was part of his appeal. In those songs lay a history of contradiction: wanting but knowing better; seeking redemption in wealth and its very opposite. Years and enumerable artistic wins later, Kanye has grown no less absorbing — he might very well be our last truly unpredictable star. And with success comes etiquette, a sense of breeding, and a scrutiny of details invisible to most. “The Lyor Cohen of Dior Homme,” he billed himself on last year’s “Devil in a New Dress” before clarifying: “That’s Dior Homme, not Dior, homie” — because you would be an idiot to have assumed that. Recognizing Kanye’s self-awareness is critical to understanding Watch the Throne, his collaborative album with Jay-Z. Here is an album that has begged to be taken seriously as an event, from its lavish, paranoid listening sessions to Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci’s gilded, Transformer-at-rest album cover. The powers that be chose to debut the album on iTunes rather than stores so that fans worldwide could experience the duo’s grand vision together at the same time — a strike against Internet piracy disguised as a gesture of egalitarianism, a victory for the big guy over mom-and-pop record shops. But none of this could truly prepare listeners for Watch the Throne, which, at its core, is a marvel of affluenza. “This is luxury rap/The Hermes of verses,” Kanye remarked on the lead single, “Otis,” and while hip-hop has always made a sport of excess,Watch the Throne indeed suggests a new scale of possibility. It is the culmination of a wealth-happy maximalism that is as logical as it is ill-timed. Rarely has an album seemed so simultaneously in and out of touch with the exigencies of American life.
In the informal game of Throne, Kanye emerges victorious, mostly because the album’s vision is so clearly his. As artistic alliances go, we could do worse.
Hua Hsu
