Interesting Jay Z Criticism

[Professor Polo]

Ayyy.



Nah, not that one.

Ahhh another Cole hater.... awesome

 

[Ghpstface]

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.

there's always exceptions thats why i said rarely ... notice how the rolling stones fell all the way off after the mid-70s and became more of a business than a band just to name one example

 

[Mike Otherz]

this the dude that wrote it. get ya opinions on black men that come up from these hipster cacs breh. we all know cacs make horrible rap for the most part. in short they shouldnt be allowed to talk on it imho. ok i take that back they should be allowed but what they get out of rap aint the same as what i get out of it. to them its just sexy music, no political or social context.

whine about nikkaz being broke then hate on an example of a non broke nikka. for the record i dont even mess with jays music so much anymore. but the boohooing about his existence at this point imho is representative of something else i find sinister. and it hides behind "truth telling journalism", the same way kufi nikkaz hide behind "saving black people".

pretty simple, a dude dont make music you like pay him no mind.

 

[Mike Otherz]

there's always exceptions thats why i said rarely ... notice how the rolling stones fell all the way off after the mid-70s and became more of a business than a band just to name one example

jays music not being as dope as it used to be more than likely has to do with the fact that most artists start to be less interesting/innovative the more succesful and older they get. thats just musical nature, jay isnt the exception, he is the norm. same as the stones. same as the beatles/mcartney. same as damn near every great artist. if we accept that then why the belly aching? why we got to act like its because he likes being a business man? why we got to act like his money talk is unique to now, when he been on that from day one? most artists hit a hot period creatively, ride it out and then decline. aint nothing unique about jay. enjoy the era you prefer and keep it moving. this millenial social media generation has too much internet real estate to cater to that they now just rambling and whining.

and the dude noz has questionable taste when it comes to rap. a lot of lowest common denominator rap he loves because its to him, musically and aestheically innovative, never mind that the subject matter is reductive.

 

[Big Woadie]

Is Jay-Z an opportunistic sell out corny culture vulture

a) yes
b) yeah
c) uh-um
d) yep

 

[Surreal]

Why people try to act brand new about Jay?

He was always this way. I say enjoy him; sense you made him

 

[Mike Otherz]

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. Butgreat 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 windowvision. 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.


This is shyt that sounds smart to a dumb person. Some observations:

1) A year and a bit later I don't care about Yeezus. That album had it's little subversive moment but its not useful in any way whatsoever in 2015 except to self conscious art studenty types. Most pitchfork favorites dont have much use beyond the "right now" hipness of their moment. Just cause its different doesnt mean its good. FKA Twigs is another..

2) So people who don't share his taste in rap are mediocre? Dude is clearly trolling. Why doesn't he ask the people that love J Cole what they love about him, instead of just insulting them? I'm sure they could come up with something more illuminating than "he talks about himself all the time". This kind of im smart you are dumb form of music writing is just attention seeking performance art, and not real criticism. Its cool for a message board like this, but from a professional critic? art is subjective breh. Its from a different album but I'll take January 28th over any Kanye song from Yeezus. I haven't got the critical chops to tell you why I love that song but I just know it evokes emotions in me that I respond positively to.

3) Nas only virtue is his project window style? What about his voice? Nas has one of the most authentic voices in rap history. Second only to rakim as far as i'm concerned. Thats what separates nas from kendrick imho. Kendrick scores very high on every criteria but his voice is what will stop him from ultimately matching nas.

 

[The God Poster]

this the dude that wrote it. get ya opinions on black men that come up from these hipster cacs breh. we all know cacs make horrible rap for the most part. in short they shouldnt be allowed to talk on it imho. ok i take that back they should be allowed but what they get out of rap aint the same as what i get out of it. to them its just sexy music, no political or social context.

whine about nikkaz being broke then hate on an example of a non broke nikka. for the record i dont even mess with jays music so much anymore. but the boohooing about his existence at this point imho is representative of something else i find sinister. and it hides behind "truth telling journalism", the same way kufi nikkaz hide behind "saving black people".

pretty simple, a dude dont make music you like pay him no mind.

Sunday Sermon

 

[HearNoEvil]

Y'all are right though, it's bad business to put "ether" in the title when it's more of a simple analysis.

 

[Diunx]

By some guy who's blog I like

He tried - and of course failed - to shut down autotune, the catalyst for some of the most thrilling vocal innovations the genre has seen since Kool Moe Dee first invented fast rap on the toilet in the ’80s.

http://tumblinerb.com/

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

Stopped reading right here

 

[Big Woadie]

Stopped reading right here

Since Jigga is arguably the biggest musical sellout in modern history, and the biggest culture vulture also, it's kinda funny how much pass he gets for all the pathetic shyt he pulled or tried to pull in his colorful career.

The autotune shyt is one of my favorites.

It's one of those L's nobody talks about because everyone so indoctrinated to "respect" Jay...it's not even funny. I remember fukkers on internet going crazy at Jay


Those e-thots actually thought Jigga gonna shut down autotune


They actually thought Jigga bout to put an end in recording practices of musicians


They actually thought peeps were off that.........like....autotune is Timbs and Jay can just say it and have everybody off that



And let's not even start on Timbs



Jigga is the greatest, biggest phagoette in hip-hop history, like without even trying to be funny right now. Dude's the hottest musical mess in hip-hop history.

 

[Ghpstface]

jays music not being as dope as it used to be more than likely has to do with the fact that most artists start to be less interesting/innovative the more succesful and older they get. thats just musical nature, jay isnt the exception, he is the norm. same as the stones. same as the beatles/mcartney. same as damn near every great artist. if we accept that then why the belly aching? why we got to act like its because he likes being a business man? why we got to act like his money talk is unique to now, when he been on that from day one? most artists hit a hot period creatively, ride it out and then decline. aint nothing unique about jay. enjoy the era you prefer and keep it moving. this millenial social media generation has too much internet real estate to cater to that they now just rambling and whining.

and the dude noz has questionable taste when it comes to rap. a lot of lowest common denominator rap he loves because its to him, musically and aestheically innovative, never mind that the subject matter is reductive.

so you agree w/ me, but you'd just rather not discuss it ... ok thats your prerogative

 

[Ghpstface]

But what if you view music (or art in general) as a motivational tool?

if you wanna listen to tony robbins over hot beats thats cool i guess

 

[Notorious 1 E.Y.E.]

Was pretty lame to put ether in the title
but dude who wrote that I'd 99% correct
That shyt he did with the roots For unplugged was dope

 

[Bickin Back Being Bool]