I kept tabs on Jay-Z right up until just before this album came out, then lost the thread due to moving house, moving country, and a load of other stuff happening all at the same time, not least being marriage. Once the dust had settled, I came across this in CD Exchange. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might have kept on putting out new material in my absence, particularly given the number of times he'd already announced his retirement. My hopes weren't high given that the last two had been pretty underwhelming, but what the fuck? I thought.
It didn't make much of an impression at first, which is why I've had The Blueprint III on my shelves for a couple of years and only now have I come to play it more than twice in the same week; and yet it made some impression because I kept listening, albeit infrequently. I've had both Kingdom Come and American Gangster significantly longer and still couldn't tell you a single thing about either, except that the pillock from Coldplay is on one of them.
I always had the impression Jay-Z was on a mission to record the mythic classic rap album, solid from start to finish, the set which would hold its own alongside Illmatic and the rest. He came close more than once but I'm not convinced either The Blueprint or The Black Album ever quite got there, great though they undoubtedly were. Given how The Blueprint III follows a couple of duds and represents the third recycling of a winning title, I had a feeling it was going to be one of those in the vein of The Dynasty which just sort of sits there between a couple of better records - not actually bad, but not something you'd necessarily bother including on your CV; but now that I've made the effort, I realise I'm wrong, and The Blueprint III may even have been his best - if not in terms of immediacy.
The standout tracks, What We Talkin' About, Empire State of Mind, and Real As It Gets are easily amongst the lad's greatest for my money, perfecting what I suppose we might as well call stadium trap - cinematic whilst somehow invoking Aaron Copland through the thoroughly contemporary orchestration - at least as of 2009 - of vaguely epic squiggles copied and pasted to different bits of a screen; and it probably helps that the rest of the record does its own thing rather than attempt to capitalise on this winning formula. No ID, Timbaland, the Neptunes and others - notably Kanye West before we all got sick of hearing about the fucker - chop up something extrapolated from that New York sound rooted in DJ Premier and the like, soulful with a lot of kick in the lower end but without necessarily covering old ground. Only Swizz Beatz lets the side down, phoning in another one of those things which sounds as though it came from the soundtrack of Jersey Shore and should rightfully be backing a loop of Deena saying something fucking stupid about how much she likes to party; but never mind. Everybody is allowed at least one clunker when the rest is good.
Lyrically speaking, Jay-Z does what he usually does, namely bigging himself up for an hour or so with a reasonable degree of wit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and on this occasion it works really well. Swizz Beatz aside, all the elements here add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, resulting in album of such fresh and breezy composition that it has the feeling of a debut - not bad going for a guy who had just reached the end of his second decade in the biz.
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