The Blueprint 3 is absolutely the most schizophrenic album I’ve ever heard. It sounds like the kind of music you could expect to be made by a man on the brink of Alzheimer’s. It is exactly one part sublime, one part ridiculous, with those two parts split almost perfectly down the middle. This album represents all the weird things about aging; good and bad. It’s Jordan in a Wizards jersey and Ali taking diet pills.
Now, there are a lot of ways to grade an album. The most popular way and one that was done expertly to Blueprint 3 by Casey Gane-McCalla on The Urban Daily, is to dissect each song and rate it, then rate the album as an average of each song’s ratings.
My way is a little simpler. It goes back to (I’m gonna date myself here but you guys all know I’m old, so…) when Donna Summer released her Bad Girls album and I, for the life of me, could not understand how Donna could make the economically catastrophic mistake of putting the song “Bad Girls” and the song “Hot Stuff” on the same album. Good work like that, I theorized, should be spread out for the maximization of the bottom line.
Somehow, that I’m not even aware of, I eventually decided that two songs wasn’t enough however and subsequently decided that a great album needed to have at least four great songs.
Now, does Jay-Z deliver four great songs on Blueprint 3? Absolutely.
“Thank You” is one part mock-humility, then concludes as the first diss song ever to take the high road.
“Venus vs. Mars” is a patiently explained, rap literary reference.
“A Star Is Born” allows Jay to do something I thought only writers were clever enough to do; pay homage to their contemporaries while simultaneously self-glorifying.
“Empire State of Mind” is the song that gets literally snatched from Jay and possessed by Alicia Keys who dominates it like it was hers and should have been on her album.
The rest of the album is crap (or you’ve heard it already and by now you’re tired of it).
It’s amazing to me that a rapper nearing his 40th birthday could still manage to make an album that even his detractors will be compelled to take a position on.
For that fact alone, Jay-Z must be commended.
