But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t still be amazing. The reason everybody on planet Earth loved Kanye’s masterful My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (besides its game-changing instrumental prowess) was that you could hear a heart beating underneath all that bling. In lieu of revelatory lyrics, there are dick jokes and stacks of cash. Instead, Watch The Throne is as about as soulful as that gold-plated cover art. While they’ve shared the stage on numerous occasions and popped in on each other’s albums for occasional guest verses, their relationship has always remained somewhat mythological, scattered details of their history dispensed on Kanye’s love-letter Graduation tribute, “Big Brother.” Watch The Throne, then, could have resulted in a handful of presentations-but perhaps the most badass route would have been an epic two-sides-of-the-same-coin story with both rappers sharing their histories over some of the finest beats a studio can sprout.
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We all know the story: Kanye grew up idolizing Jay-and through his rising in the ranks as a producer, working on some of Jay’s landmark LPs (2001’s The Blueprint, 2003’s The Black Album), the torch was metaphorically passed, culminating in West’s larger-than-life solo career.
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When it comes to hip hop, these two certainly have created a religion-worshipped by critics and fans alike, they’ve forever altered its history (Kanye with his lyrical soul bearing and genre-blurring production Jay-Z with his simply untouchable flow).
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Kanye answers: “We formed our own religion no sin as long as there’s permission.” “What’s a God to a non-believer?” he croons over a four-to-the-floor pulse and strangled metal guitar riff. Strange that, for an album built around what might be the most star-studded duo collab in hip hop history, the first voice you hear on the highly anticipated Watch The Throne is neither Jay-Z’s nor Kanye West’s, but that of Odd Future soul freak Frank Ocean.