Interesting Jay Z Criticism

[KravenMorehead™]

Ouch.

 

[Mike Otherz]

im happy/proud for jay's success but like chris rock said i dont wanna hear warren buffett or bill gates' rap album

nvm. but an important aside, a warren buphet rap album could only be made by a white person.

 

[Mike Otherz]

tublinerb is that andrew noz noslinsky? why y'all letting a cac determine ya views on a succesful black man brehs. smh. like dame said, a white man always gotta be the leader of black people.

 

[Mike Otherz]

my computer is a tool ... a utensil ... an appliance ... not a work of creative expression for me to enjoy, analyze and reflect on


business and creativity rarely co-exist w/o one compromising the other ... thats how we get corporate sellout music on one hand and companies that hemorrhage $ chasing asinine ideas and whims on the other

one of the dumbest things i have ever heard. the beatles, the rolling stones, bruce springsteen, herp albert, have huge critical acclaim, and are all damn near billionaires. herp albert was co founder of THE biggest independent label in history and the cat is a billionaire. people just take their frustrations out on jay when jay aint holding any of you back shyt.

kendrick is platinum, as is drake is platinum, and em. they have different subject matter. i dont see any negative influence from dude at all. he is pretty singular in his rap existence.

the dude that wrote that blog is called noz and has become more cynical as he has aged. he hates everyone he used to love. used to love nas, used to love bun b, used to love wayne. now he loves future and young thug. shyt, tell him to make the rap music he wanna hear instead of sittin back like a woman and picking at a nikka not being who you want him to be. thats one thing we can all c/s dame on.

the best criticism is to make better art. its more productive and less cynical. the french new wave directors of the 60's all started out as critics, but then they put their money where their mouth was and made some of the dopest films ever. cats like francis truffaut, jean luc godard etc. who wants to hear them whine about films they dont like? that shyt gets tiring after you've heard it a million times.

plus people who long for a past that never existed in the first place aren't to be trusted. time has a way of distorting history. did people really love jay in the past? he used to get called derivative, materialistic, sexist etc. now he's capitalist. if its not one thing its something else. people always gonna need a reason to hate, i guess in 2015 its jay is a capitalist. guess what, its a lot of rap nikkaz that dont make capitalistic rap music, why not just bump them? why there always got to be a bad guy who is stopping rap music or your existence from some glorious fulfilment?

the older i get the more i realise professional rap critcism is a joke. greg tate is the og but in hindsight dude was just a very talented hater. hated on mj. hated on miles. then they died and now he talks about how great they were. i guess you gotta die first to get these intellectual hustlers off ya ass as haters. they aint finished with you though, cause after you dead they gonna eat off of talking bout ya history.

thats one thing pac said before he died. on his final interview with sway they asked him about toure who was trashing him in the village voice at the time. and pac said a story his mother told him about malcolm. she said all the people who wrote books about malcolm after he died, about his history, his importance? they were all haters when he was alive. and that people like toure were the same. spend ya careers hating on rap nikkaz yet make ya living explaining rap culture to cacs. and of course, you could find toure on the regular on fox news, cnn etc in the early millennium being their negro culture expert. shyt is embarrasing.

 

[mr.africa]

heard 'ether' and was like only for that to be followed by 'some guy on a blog'

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

this is all fact

 

[ralph lauren]

By some guy who's blog I like



http://tumblinerb.com/

He's done a pretty good one on J.Cole too.

post the j cole onee

 

[Capo Dei Capi]

heard 'ether' and was like only for that to be followed by 'some guy on a blog'

same here, then I went to neg him and saw reps still gone

 

[Professor Polo]

That was all 100% facts on Jay.


In regards to J. Cole, he said something about he and all his friends are adults so he doesn't have that many j. Cole fans... if they were obsessed he'd tell them to quit it.

 

[dirty_yo]

Ayo @blackslash get in here

 

[ManBearPig]

he made horrible music with The Roots?

that unplugged album?

 

[Cloud McFly]

It seems as as though any negative talk about Jay-Z is classified as Ether, and instantly applauded/praised by you cats.

Get this stupid whiny bullshyt out of here

 

[HearNoEvil]

same here, then I went to neg him and saw reps still gone

Ayyy.

That was all 100% facts on Jay.


In regards to J. Cole, he said something about he and all his friends are adults so he doesn't have that many j. Cole fans... if they were obsessed he'd tell them to quit it.

Nah, not that one.

Well to provide a little context - I wrote that subtweet in response to a mess of folks on my twitter timeline who were taking great pleasure in the fact that Cole’s record was coming so close to matching the sales of Kanye’s Yeezus. This is sort of understandable - Kanye’s a natural heel and he works pretty hard to invoke the wrath of the masses. But come the fukk on thinking people, for better or worse he made a very ambitious album and has a bunch of squares banging acid squelches and metallic shard bursts while scratching their heads. It might only be subversive as a means to amplify Kanye’s ego, but at least it’s subversive. J. Cole made a regular ass mediocre rap record that only appeals to and appeases the mediocre people of the world.And I do mean mediocre in the most literal sense. I don’t think Cole’s garbage or anything. Dude can rap okay as far as rapping humans go. If he were in a cipher on a corner or in a dorm room or at an open mic or whatever he’d surely evoke the “oh cool, rapping” response that such activities exist to evoke. That old rap rap raprap / rap ra rap rap approach can go a long way in certain social situations. But great rappers and rap stars have historically been expected to transcend that.I mean this guy is supposed to be a great lyricist, a compelling writer, The Nas Of Our Time but nobody seems to notice that he failed to absorb the most (only?) compelling aspect of Nas’ style - that project window vision. Dude is wholly incapable of seeing outside of himself. Literally every idea on Born Sinner is I / me / my on some elementary school essay shyt. His subjects exist only as one dimensional props for him to hang his own personality and narratives on.The “Art Of Storytelling” beat jack on “Land Of The Snakes” is perfect because it opens Cole up to such a bold contrast against the Outkast original. Sasha Thumper was a fully formed human, one with hopes and fears and slumber parties. She even exits the scene and lives an entire life outside of Andre’s verse. The women of “Snakes" and elsewhere on BS are set pieces. They have no names, no stories, no personalities, no specific characteristics. It’s just “this bytch,” “some hoes” and endless “she”s. Sometimes they talk at him like wamp wamp wamp wamp but that’s where it stops. I’m sure someone could extract an intense gender politics thinkpiece out of this but it’s not just women either. He does the same thing with his family, with physical spaces, even with his own heroes (On “Let Nas Down” Cole makes no specific case for Nas’ talents or appeal, he just talks about shaking dude’s hand and hanging posters on the wall.) It’s flat narcissism and it’s definitely not good writing. Good writing requires a panoramic worldview.And I can hear you little frutflies spitting out cheetoh dust onto your keyboard and filling my ask box with baahh but Chief Keef and Migos can write? questions. No, of course not. Those guys fukking suck at traditional rhyme writing when compared to Cole’s ample mediocrity. But their goals are very different. They redirect the effort that they would’ve put into pure lyricism elsewhere - into delivery, into structure, into intensity, into flows, into adlibs, into hooks, into sonics. This is perfectly fine. Writing (“lyricism”) isn’t everything in rap. I don’t even think it’s the most important thing. But if an artist is going to make it the focal point of their work - which is what Cole clearly aims to do - then they should be doing it better than he does. I mean not to go all old head on you but if someone is not at least striving to be as vivid as Nas or as emotive as Scarface or as imaginative as Posdnuos or as bugged out as Cam’ron then I’d be more comfortable if they were to just give up on writing entirely and make a thousand kewl grunt noises on their record.
I don’t know, maybe this is a generational thing - you young people sure are in love with yourselves and maybe you need stars who are equally self-obsessed - but as a writer it’s hard for me to sit back and call someone a good writer if their shyt is as insular and shallow as Cole’s. Wale suffers from this sort of narcissism and lightweight laziness too and you could pretty easily sub his middling ass new album into any paragraph here. These guys are stuck in their own heads and bouncing around cliches that they cribbed from played out Mount Rushmore rap legends like Nas and Jay. They see nothing beyond the mirror and do very little within this narrow perspective. They’re prisoners of their own realities and of the laws of language and it destroys me to think that anyone would consider them the great lyricists of our time. But hey most people don’t pay very much attention to words at all anymore so whatever.

 

[HearNoEvil]

So this dude is white?

I liked some of his opinions, but now I'm likely to read him less. Oh well.

 

[Rekkapryde]

He's not really wrong....