And that sucks, since “Ain’t I” is a serious banger.įirst off, the track, has one of those epic Timbaland beats that just barely seems to exist anymore. Clue apparently had no idea what he was talking about.
![unrelased jay z ignorant shit unrelased jay z ignorant shit](https://static.hiphopdx.com/assets/prod/img/wire.holder.review.jpg)
( Shock Value, I shouldn’t need to point out, would’ve been a whole lot better with this song.) So: No Blueprint 3, as far as we know. But a day later, details emerged: There’s no Blueprint 3, and the track just an unreleased thing from the sessions for Timbaland’s Shock Value album. Nobody had heard one word about any potential Blueprint 3 project before Clue yelled it, but American Gangster came just as abruptly after a New York Times announcement, so word of an album like that could conceivably just leak out like that in the form of a cryptic Clue quote. But one of the things Clue shouts at the beginning of the track is this: “Off that Blueprint 3.” Clue has been tight with Jay-Z for a long, long time he’s still one of the only four people to go platinum on Roc-A-Fella, along with Jay, Kanye, and Cam’ron. “Ain’t I” is going to be on the next DJ Clue mixtape, and so Clue shouts over the whole thing the way Clue always does one of my favorite moments comes when he shouts out my mixtape guy, Amadou on 14th Street.
![unrelased jay z ignorant shit unrelased jay z ignorant shit](https://centralsauce.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/blackalbum3.jpg)
Still, nothing on American Gangster except maybe “Blue Magic” captured Jay’s old egotistical virtuosity like “Ain’t I,” the new Jay track that hit the internet a couple of days ago.Įxtenuating circumstances make it hard to enjoy “Ain’t I” as the amazing piece of evil precision it is without wondering what it could’ve portended. Maybe that’s not the path I’d ideally like to see him follow, and maybe it’ll prove impossible, but it’s hard to imagine him pulling that off more successfully than he did on American Gangster. Jay seems bent on doing something unprecedented: maturing into a modern-royalty mogul figure without sacrificing any of his up-from-nothing swagger and his artistic vision. Its tracks still bang luxuriously, its cinematically ominous moments still forbid, and the eventual fuckups on “Fallin'” still sound like something Jay has spent a whole lot of time thinking about. Even with all that, though, I still really like American Gangster. And he hasn’t done himself any favors since the album’s release, leaving Def Jam, mulling over whatever other rich-guy moves he can make, and, according to Peedi Crack, dropping everyone on Roc-A-Fella.
![unrelased jay z ignorant shit unrelased jay z ignorant shit](https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/OpYAAOSwBzdgR4pc/s-l225.jpg)
The concept-album stuff doesn’t hold together and never did, the beats are maybe too wrapped up in 70s-soul signifiers to scan as anything other than expensive throwbacks ( great expensive throwbacks, but still), and the self-justifying arguments on “Ignorant Shit” are thin and unconvincing, not least because he hasn’t done much to piss off Al Sharpton in the past few years and because he doesn’t really need to be making excuses for himself. Jay-Z shouldn’t need some bullshit concept-album excuse to revisit all his old drug-talk if he wants to talk about killing people, he should just interrupt his own played-out maturity storyline and talk about killing people. And, granted, some of the album’s luster has faded. Over the past few months, I’ve seen this prevailing rap-blog-critic consensus emerge around American Gangster: that it’s actually not that great of an album, that it only got good reviews early on because it wasn’t Kingdom Come, that Jay still sounds old and clumsy and not even totally certain he still wants to be rapping.