Babar…?
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[7.30]
Brad Shoup: The track sounds like money. If WhoSampled hadn’t told me otherwise, I would’ve thought the guitar part was commission work. It’s nightwind on a freshly-waxed Corniche (or a Ferrari SUV), blown-past skyscrapers made simultaneously smaller and grander with purchased access. Kanye scans the room in a daze, grappling with the bends of Black success; Jay’s got his eye to the peephole, anticipating a raid by the weight of history (“Thanksgiving disguised as a feast” has got to be an all-time pop koan). Ocean tosses off rhetoricals like he can afford the responses. The-Dream is the channel for everyone’s hope that this will all be worth it. The spell is strained with Kanye’s forced profundities, as well as the animal sounds in the fade-out. But only barely.
[9]
Jonathan Bradley: Listen to The Black Album or The Blueprint to remind yourself how much Jay’s skills have deteriorated, but don’t allow his superior works to distract from the dexterity with which he can still construct an idea across a verse. Here his concerns are opulence and sacrilege, and the cumulative effect of his vignettes — “blood stains the Colosseum doors”; “lies from the lips of a priest” — suggests an accordance between the fall of a man and the fall of an empire. It’s the stuff of classical tragedy: a god-king hubris that becomes less preposterous when heard as an introduction to the larger meditation on race and success that is Watch the Throne. (Other highlights include the collision of blasphemy and anointment that is “Jesus was a carpenter; Yeezy, he made beats” and “Cocaine seats: all white like I got the whole thing bleached,” which reminds how adept Hov still is at blurring the drug trade’s nauseating qualities with its most intoxicating.) West, for his part, explicates the intricacies of his psycho-sexual dramas, and is far less interesting doing so, but he does revel in his knack for capturing the grossness of excess. “Last night was mad real: sunglasses and Advil” is the kind of quick and woozily precise couplet that redeems his half of the track. Luxuriate in the beat, too: that heart-beat rhythm and rich bass says as much as either man does here.
[8]
Ramzi Awn: Sunglasses and Advil never sounded so right. I’m already ready for a bacon egg ‘n cheese, that guy from last night haunting my dreams like a ghost with no place to be. The faint gloss of prepackaging doesn’t fall on deaf ears, but pass me the J and I’m good.
[7]
Alfred Soto: The-Dream’s innocuous contribution excepted, a far stronger track isolated from its parent album. Kanye, reliant on sunglasses and Advil in the morning, plays the aging hedonist to Jay-Z’s griot, which he does without tripping philosophically or physically on ropy lines like “Is Pious pious cause God loves pious?/Socrates asked whose bias do y’all seek?” A professional job professionally done.
[7]
Michelle Myers: In the right context, I suppose it works. That bass sample sounds slick and important in movie trailers and functions well enough as intro track on Watch The Throne, establishing its high stakes luxury rap while remaining sonically subdued, allowing the album to build up to the bombast of “Paris.” But as a single, this doesn’t make much sense. It’s meandering and a little boring. Lyrics that seem profound in the context of WTT’s proggy ostentation suddenly feel purple and melodramatic.
[4]
Iain Mew: The wild in question comes across as totally desolate but with a harsh beauty. The animal noises are shocking sonically when everything else is so carefully controlled, but also because the nihilism has been enough to convince that there is nothing there to believe in or otherwise. Jay-Z and Frank Ocean up first are both exceptional — “mausoleum floor/Colosseum door” sets up the atmosphere too perfectly for a slightly off-message Kanye to spoil it later.
[8]
Anthony Easton: I had an evangelical friend who called me licentious the other day — maybe semi-ironically, but, you know, also really quite serious. I told him back, less ironically and more seriously, that I worked hard on getting that license. I did it in backrooms, at night in bars, in bath houses, at 3 a.m. after-hours clubs, in the city — those were the easy places, but places without grace. I like to think that Sunday morning after church, my time in working-class suburbs, or on farms, quoting Patrick Califia in ethics papers, and Mark Doty during church, and all of the myriad kitchen tables I have sat around gave me that license. But if I can be a bit self-aggrandizing, even though this plays with yes-means-yes changes in the language of consent, it still treats women like animals or passive partners. The tension is difficult, and I wonder what, for Kanye and Jay-Z, working for that license would look like. All of that said, I love how it fucks with the tropes of religion, and I love some of the imagery, and I love how wealthy — smooth, slick, without blemish — and how artificial, silvery, pure sex it sounds like. That is where most of the points come from.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: In different moods, I can hear that as menacing, dangerous and perhaps even weirdly sexual. It sounds weighty, and the illusion is damn strong unless you pay close attention and realise that it’s the rumbling production that carries the track; the words are weightless, especially West’s. Ocean’s chorus is a bit of an overreach, but… animal noises forgive an awful lot on that score.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Almost no one is operating at 100 per cent here; even 75 per cent would be generous. Hova’s flow is wholly a ghost, Kanye is obnoxious, Frank Ocean is one and possibly two albums away from being up to this, and The-Dream does fine with what’s basically a theremin line. Then there’s 88-Keys, who doesn’t produce this so much as carve it out of thin air. The percentages average perfectly.
[9]
Jonathan Bogart: I, uh, really need to sit down at some point and listen to all of Watch the Throne, don’t I? Every single song I’ve heard from it has gone from “cute concept” to “fundamentally necessary” within the space of five listens.
[8]