![]() ![]() ![]() It opens with “A Dream,” which skews, at points, awfully close to nightmare territory. The record is undoubtedly saddled with filler, but the sequencing – always one of Jay’s strong suits, both as an artist and an executive – keeps it from seeming cluttered or disorganized. While Blueprint 2 never quite presents a unified theory of JAY-Z, it does in fact contain some of his best rapping, some razor-sharp songwriting, and a couple of wild experiments in both genre and style. It was an inspired approach, and one that he hoped, on Blueprint 2, to merge with the styles he had perfected in the late 90s and on 2000’s The Dynasty: Roc La Familia. It was also his most improvisational record, one where his words responded to the tics of the beats in a way his more acrobatic rapping from prior records had not. His writing turned more autobiographical than it had been since Reasonable Doubt (and saw him burrow even deeper into his psyche than he had on his debut). The dense, warm, soul-sampling beats provided by Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Bink stole most of the headlines, but he was also rapping differently – with fewer syllables, sometimes slower, often hitting words more deliberately. With one album, Jay went from being one of the best living rappers to Best Rapper Alive vaulting into the company of immortals seemed like the next logical step.Īnd yet this was not simply a question of framing: The Blueprint marked an important stylistic shift for Jay. It recontextualized Jay’s career to that point, bookending a series of wildly popular records with two that argued for him as a serious, sober-minded album artist to the fans and critics who value such things. ![]() 1 album, and was hailed almost immediately as a masterpiece. The Blueprint, released on 9/11, was his fourth consecutive No. When Jay emerged from his brief retirement at the end of 2006 – just weeks before he dropped Kingdom Come – he delivered an extraordinary freestyle on Funkmaster Flex’s show: “‘ Hov got flow, though he’s no Big and Pac / but he’s close’ / How I’m supposed to win? / They got me fighting ghosts.” But back in 2002, when recording for Blueprint 2 had begun in earnest, Jay was at a commercial and critical high-water mark. Guru had argued that Jay needed a double LP to stand alongside the genre’s late giants, 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. “Fucking Guru and Hip Hop, ha.” It wasn’t out of the blue: the year before, Young Guru, Jay’s longtime engineer and confidant, had given an interview where he admitted pushing Jay to make BP 2 a double album. 11 slot, above only Kingdom Come, his widely-maligned 2006 comeback effort. On his 44th birthday, the Brooklyn-bred legend sat down and ranked the 12 solo albums he had released at that point. To understand The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse, one should first know that JAY-Z isn’t particularly proud of it. ![]()
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