Album Review: Jay-Z- Magna Carta Holy Grail

So the announcement of Jay-Z’s new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail was, overall, a dick move.

Label mate and best bro Kanye West’s album Yeezus WASN’T EVEN OFFICIALLY OUT YET—it had leaked 48 hours prior. So wait to steal the shine off your boy ‘Ye. Revealed during a television commercial for Samsung mobile phones during the NBA Championship, Magna Carta is, at its base level, the antithesis of what Yeezus was and is.

Jigga sold a MILLION downloads of this album to Samsung, who developed an exclusive app that would allow you to preview lyrics and behind the scenes videos from the recording sessions, and then at midnight on July 4^th, you had the opportunity to download the album to your phone. Because in 2013, that’s the best way to hear music for the very first time. ON YOUR FUCKING PHONE.

The real album, like a physical product, will be available on the 7^th.

It should be noted that since these downloads were sold to Samsung, and money exchanged hands, moving a million copies of a album makes it platinum, son. PLATINUM AT THE TIME OF RELEASE. Isn’t’ that the most baller shit of all time? Leave it to somebody like Jay-Z to concoct a ridiculously self-aggrandizing strategy such as this.

Jay-Z is, by all accounts, the “American Dream.”

Quite literally, Jigga is a self-made man. It’s well known that prior to the success of his debut, Reasonable Doubt, and the subsequent mainstream success that grew which each album he released, that Jay dealt drugs to support himself. And like that’s fine. Sometimes the rap game reminds me of the crack came. Whatever. Who hasn’t dealt drugs to support themselves, am I right you guys?

Cut to less than twenty years later, and Jay-Z is, like, best bros with THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. This is the American Dream you guys. You can openly admit to being a drug dealer, but then you can be invited to the inauguration of the fucking President. You can marry an R&B chick. You can be named some kind of director of something at Budweiser and they’ll sponsor the aptly title “Made in America” festival.

So here we are. We’ve arrived at Jigga’s 12^th solo joint, Magna Carta Holy Grail—the title of which, it dawned on me, is a bit of a play on his given name—Shawn Carter. Carter = Carta. Mind = blown?

In the days leading up to the album’s “release” via cellphone, the lyric sheets to certain tracks were being posted on the phone app. And this is when it was time to be concerned.

Like I’ve never claimed to be the world’s biggest Jay-Z fan. I like his popular singles like “99 Problems,” and “Dirt Off Yo Shoulder.” Who doesn’t? Who seriously doesn’t like those songs? Show me that person. And I will call them a liar to their face. So Jigga has released 11 solo albums prior to this. I can’t even name all 11 of them. I know some involve the phrase “In My Lifetime,” and some involve “The Blueprint.” That was Jay’s last solo joint, I believe. The Blueprint 3, from 2009. It had that song about New York on it. You know the one. My wife is quick to point out that there aren’t that many songs about New York, so it’s good that Jay-Z got around to writing one.

Magna Carta Holy Grail was released at midnight EST. So that meant July 3^rd, 11:00p, I thought I could totally download it. I watched the app count down to zero, and then nothing happened. The clock reset itself to a countdown of when the album is available in stores. I tapped the “Enter Magna Carta” button on the screen. Nothing happened.

As I was explaining this whole concept behind the release of Magna Carta to my wife, her first question was, “So do that many people give a shit about Jay-Z?”

Not so much like when My Bloody Valentine released M B V and the internet broke because too many people were trying to order the album and download it from their website, but apparently just TOO MANY PEOPLE were trying to use their Samsung mobile device and use their special Jay-Z app and it just wasn’t working. Wow. Really anticlimactic. I tried a few more times before it got to be like 11:30, and then I realized that I do not give that much of a shit about Jay-Z to be messing around with this, and that I needed to brush my rabbits and get them in their little rabbit area for the night.

I figured that one million people will not have claimed their copy of this by morning, and that this could wait.

Well I was right. At 6:30 the next morning, downloading the album ran very smoothly. And by “downloading” I mean the music lives in the app, on my phone. The songs themselves, to my knowledge, are not in any real location on my phone as files, wherein I could remove them and put them on my computer and burn them to a c.d. So referring to this as a “download” is pretty misleading.

But here, I’ve spent nearly 900 words talking about this stupid app and this preposterous marketing campaign, and about how Jigga is the American Dream, and I haven’t even talked about the album yet.

So here we go.

The first song, “Holy Grail,” involves Justin Timberlake. In fact, the first like two minutes of the song is Timberlake singing his motherfucking heart out, before Jigga steps in. “Blue told me remind you n***as/Fuck that shit ya’ll talking ‘bout. I’m that n***a.” Blue, of course, being Jay-Z’s daughter, who is less than two years old. So I kind of doubt she really said that. But if she did, that has to be the COOLEST KID EVER. I wish my rabbits would tell me something like that. Instead they just sniff me and get scared when the oven beeps.

It’s also worth noting that on “Holy Grail,” Timberlake sings a brief excerpt from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—“And we all just /Entertainers/And we’re stupid/and contagious.” Prior to that, Jigga drops one of many lyrics that seem like he’s just lazily free associating—“Nobody to blame/Kurt Cobain/I did it to myself.”

“Holy Grail” is schmaltzy, thanks in part to Timberlake’s singing on the refrain: “It’s amazing that I’m in this maze with you.” What the fuck does that even mean? Like is the maze supposed to represent life, or some shit? Yeah. Real amazing guys.

So this album doesn’t get any better after that. And honestly, listening to it via a cellphone app is pretty frustrating. Each song plays individually, so when one stops, you have to start up the next one on your own. Also, it’s tough to navigate around on your phone if you are running the Jay-Z app. You’ll accidentally close out of it if you try to do something else, like go on the internet.

As with many Jay-Z songs, much of the subject matter on Magna Carta tumbles into the “luxury rap” category. There’s an entire song about fashion designer Tom Ford. And there’s an entire song about buying expensive artwork, “Picasso.” On that song Jay actually delivers one of the more interesting lyrics of the whole album—“Even my old fans like ‘old man just stop’/I could if I would but I can’t/I’m hot.” But are you though, Jay? Are you hot? Maybe you should have listened to your old fans. Maybe you should have stayed in retirement after 2003, and not released a “comeback” album three years later.

On “FuckWithMeYouKnowIt,” Jay gets some assistance from polarizing rap figure Rick Ross—a former corrections officer who has caught flack for the legitimacy of his career, but also has caught flack for not understanding how ecstasy works. Earlier this year he appeared on a song where he talked about dropping E into a girl’s drink, and then basically date raping her. That’s not actually what ecstasy would do to someone, so I guess maybe Rick Ross needs to learn how drugs work? Maybe? Anyway, Ross was dropped from an endorsement deal with Reebok over the whole thing, and on this track, makes light of it by saying, “Reeboks on/I just do it n***a.”

I guess this is a good time to just jump in here and talk about the liberal use of the “N” word. In the fallout of Paula Deen’s apparent usage of it with her staff, it seems kind of in poor taste to listen to a record where, like, every other line ends with it. In fact, many Deen supporters got their butter all melted because of the fact that rappers can use that term and nothing happens. But a famous white woman can use that term and her empire crumbles. Not like I’m a giant expert on race relations, but I think anyone with half a brain realizes the difference between these two situations. One is a rap colloquialism that makes some people uncomfortable, but that’s just part of hip-hop culture. The word has been appropriated and rebranded with a different meaning. It’s also spelled differently. I believe the racism lies when someone ends with “er” and not “a.”

But again, I’m just a middle class white guy so what the fuck do I know?

Jay’s lazy, embarrassing rhymes continue to grow more laughable, like on the song “Oceans”—“I crash through glass ceilings/I break through closed doors/I’m on the ocean/I’m in heaven/Yachting/Ocean 11.”  Seriously. “Yacthing/Ocean 11.” That’s the best you can do? Oh my god. Like I am the first to admit that my flow is not the illest, but give me some time and I could probably come up with something better than that.

So as I took a bit of a break from this, and attempted to pick it back up, I found that the special Jay-Z app on my phone crashed as soon as it opened. Twice. This happened two times. SO HOW AM I GOING TO FINISH LISTENING TO THIS MODERN MASTERPIECE? Well since this is the Internet age, somebody had ripped this somehow and put up a very low-quality copy online to download. Seeing as how I didn’t pay for it in the first place on my phone, I have no problem illegally downloading a shitty rip of this.

The second half of this is no better than the first. There’s the “Losing My Religion” borrowing “Heaven,” and two very strange tracks less than a minute each—“Beach is Better” and “Versus.” At first when I saw the running time I thought there was some kind of errors with the files I downloaded. But there’s not. They are just two very short verses that finish as quickly as they start.

As Magna Carter careens towards the end, there’s the up-tempo “BBC” featuring Pharrell, who is experiencing a career resurgence after his work with Daft Punk.  There’s a song for is daughter Blue Ivy, featuring bizarre samples of dialog from Mommy Dearest, and some surprising additional lines from the Notorious B.I.G. On “La Familia,” Jay digs back into the dated Italian vernacular that he used over a decade ago on The Dynasty. Look I don’t listen to a TON of hip-hop, but I am pretty confident that the whole “gangster crime family” angle was played out a long time ago.

The album’s final track is “Nickels and Dimes,” a fun jaunt through humble bragging, including one of the more cringe worthy lines from the whole record—“I’m just trying to find common ground/’fore Mr. Belafonte come and chop a n***a down/Mr. Day O/Major fail.” Fuck. Are you kidding me? “Major fail?”

Aside from how forgettable and embarrassing this album is, two things stuck out. The first being the obligatory track featuring his wifey Beyonce. “Part II (On The Run)” is maybe one of the most tolerable songs, primarily because the beat is so dope. The second thing that was worth nothing is the song “Crown.” Musically, it’s a little TOO familiar to the style found on Yeezus. There’s nothing else on Magna Carta that sounds like this—nothing as synth heavy, nothing including pitchshifted vocals, or clipped, thick beats and bass. So this really makes me wonder if after Jay heard Yeezus, he went directly back into the studio to record this. Or if it’s just coincidence.

Magna Carta Holy Grail is, overall, an incredibly frustrating experience. Musically, lyrically, Jay-Z is probably capable of better? Maybe? Or maybe he isn’t and this is all you get now. He sounded lazy and tired on both guest spots he’s popped up on this year (Justin Timberlake’s “Suit and Tie,” and The Dream’s “High Art.”) The ridiculously unreliable Jay-Z phone app made listening to this even more maddening. I really can’t wait to delete this whole thing off of my phone. And honestly, what is there to gain from selling one million downloads of your shitty new album to a phone manufacturer, so they can in turn give it away for free to one million people?

With two huge rap records being released within weeks of one another, if you are a defender of Yeezus, a less informed listener may ask you to show your work, and say what makes this album horrible and that album outstanding. While Kanye West is of course guilty of flossin, like, everything he owns—cars, watches, clothes, et. al—Yeezus at least has a point. It’s a fun record. It’s a dark record. There’s actual real social commentary. It makes you think because it’s so complex in structure.

Magna Carta, on the other hand...fuck. Seriously? Like there is nothing of substance here. This is not an album to make you think. And if you are capable of producing thoughts during your time spent with it, those thoughts may be, “why am I listening to this?” or “I hope this ends soon.”

I think it goes without saying that I need to finish with this: You crazy for this one, Jay.

Magna Carta Holy Grail is available right now if you own a Samsung mobile phone. For the rest of you a-holes, it's out on Sunday via Roc-A-Fella Records.