Rap Rushmore

“I’m the young city bandit, hold myself down singlehanded
For murder raps, I kick my thoughts alone, get remanded
Born alone, die alone, now crew to keep my crown or throne
I’m deep by sound alone, caved inside in a thousand miles from home”

“The World is Yours” – Nas
Illmatic – 1994

“I think with my ding-a-ling, but I won't bring no
flowers to your doorstep, when we goin out
Cause you'll take it for granted, no doubt
And after the date, I'ma want to do the wild thing
You want lobster huh? I'm thinking Burger King”

“I Ain’t Tha 1” – Ice Cube
Straight Out of Compton – 1988

In college I wrote exactly two articles for the school paper. The second one led off with “you spend your whole life working towards your first article, and one week working towards your second.”Obviously this problem for a college senior writing 800 words on whatever they would like pales in comparison to people with real artistic talent but the thought is similar and it seems to inflict be structurally embedded in hip hop. Rap inherently has this issue because the lyrics are often about the struggle growing up, the hardships of their lifestyle and the desire to get to the top. When finally at the apex rappers will often struggle to channel what got them there. Or they will transform and begin to rap about the excesses that they have which inherently leads to a disconnect with their original audience or the inevitable, mundane, repetitious material. There really are only so many different ways to say you have women and money and jewelry and cars and they all seem to be maxed out. Rap careers are often like what the NFL running back has become today. Invariably there are legendary talents, but often they are flashes in the pan who can channel their entire career into one season or one song or even one album, but inevitably fall off or take too many hits or for whatever reason cannot recreate what they had for such a short period. They are the Arian Fosters. When everything aligns and we see the immediate short term product and quickly try and project the potential of the career.

If you could have frozen time at the two exact moments those words were uttered and asked people that follow rap where those careers ended up, the answers likely would have been on the Mt. Rushmore. Ice Cube was the blend of Public Enemy. The wit of Flava Flav but ability of Chuck D. He was the lyrical leader of NWA and burst onto the scheme with a blend of anger and humor that was transformational in the late 1980s.

Nas recorded Illmatic when he was 19 years old and released it when he was 20. He had 19 years of life in Queensbridge to write about and he played on those experiences to produce what is at minimum in the pantheon of hip hop albums of all time. Nas released a single album that influenced every rapper for in the past decade and half.

The beginning was the best these two had to offer. Ice Cube became solid but not spectacular following the release of Straight Out of Compton. His wit was still there and he leveraged his marketability into the entertaining Friday series, the unintentionally entertaining Anaconda series and the painfully unentertaining world of children’s comedies. No one could call the spark plug of NWA’s career a failure but it didn’t end up being what everyone hoped it would be. He was the guy who could make you laugh when you were barely paying attention and became a guy whose original talents are often forgotten or overlooked.

Nas actually put everything he had into one album and the product was as good as anything that has ever been made, making the gradual decline so much harder to watch. A career with the same timing, trajectory and ending as Hootie and the Blowfish, Nas made more music and occasionally showed glimpses of what allowed him to produce arguably the greatest album the genre has ever seen. He just never got back to it. Only 37, Nas' his best work was made nearly two decades ago.

Watch the Throne is set to release next week on iTunes and it is the first duel collaboration with Jay-Z and Kanye West. They are not without flaws but it has been their ability to remake their image and transform who they are that has allowed Jay to take the title belt and Kanye to assume Mt. Rushmore.

Jay-Z is Jordan and like Jordan he had a talent that was breathtaking. He released it all on Reasonable Doubt, which mimicked the release, influence and timing of Illmatic allowing Nas to become the slightly disappointing career foil to Jay (culminating in their back and forth in early 00s).  You saw a slick rapping kid from Brooklyn speaking of his life on the streets and the struggle to get where he was. With Jordan you saw a high flying kid who used his natural ability, the innate gift he had to blow past defenders, and relying entirely on god-given talent but the consensus was that he took too many shots for his team to win.

Both were at the top of their abilities when they claimed their stake as the best in the game. Jordan in his string of titles in the early 1990s and Jay with his release of the Blueprint. This made them the best at that given moment but it was their transformation and evolution that allowed them to cement their position as the greatest of all time. When his jumping went Jordan became the best shooter in the league and when Jay could no longer rap about the struggle of growing up on the streets, he refined his talents and made being an entrepreneur cool. “I’m not a businessman I’m a business man,” he rapped and became an artist who could both sit with the President and carry himself with corporate leaders. He didn’t abandon who he was but instead refined his talents and image.

No Kanye doesn’t have the lyrical ability of Eminem and he never will. His rhymes are awkward and sometimes forced, almost more spoken word than rap. Kanye’s career didn’t catch fire quite like Jay’s and he had to work his way from the back office to the client facing world of the rap game. His God given talent remains not in his ability to speak but instead in his comprehension of the finished product.

He’s without the cultivated image of Jay. The “George Bush hates black people” and the Taylor Swift incident quickly eliminated any goodwill he had with the middle part of America. It was the public strip down and lashing of a man who has always been open with his demons and struggles that allowed him to produce his most artistically stimulating work to date. With his back against the wall and few on his side Kanye released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, an album that served as more of a journey than a listen. The music, with Kanye’s still awkward flow, forces the listener to go to the places Kanye was taken to over the past few years. The depths of having an entire country wanting you to fail, only to be released at the end with the Bon Iver led melody of “Lost in the World.”

You hear him speak and can’t help resent him for his arrogance. The President rightly called him a jackass but it seems to stem from a sublime understanding of his abilities and limitations. A man who admitted to a national audience that he was addicted to pornography really is ready for all the criticism and aware of who he is. Kanye is hardly the exception in his arrogance / self-confidence in the entertainment industry, but he is the exception to how he approaches it. He wears it on his sleeve and channels it in his music producing a raw product and acknowledging his short-comings.

There is almost no possible way that Watch the Throne can reach the expectations that have been set. Putting two of the best together hardly ever yields the best but the individual abilities are so strong, the talents so high, that even if the album meets the level of Nas and Ice Cube’s career, it can't be considered a disappointment. Expectations often times will overshadow a product, the Freddy Adu syndrome, I just hope we get to see enough flashes to remind us how great these two are. The Mt. Rushmore has two more heads carved in, their ability to evolve has cemented that and now we're all along for the ride waiting to see what these two become next.