Miscellany:
Jay-Z is in a privileged position where he can call up his old buddy ?uestlove and recruit The Roots as his house band whenever the occasion merits it. In the standout edition in MTV's oft-inessential live-music series Unplugged, Jay-Z and The Roots offer a relaxed, soulful retrospective of Jay-Z's impressive library of pop smashes, while backup vocalist Jaguar Wright does everything short of taking away Jay-Z's microphone in her bid to steal the spotlight. Though nowhere near as essential as Jay-Z's handful of masterpieces, 2001's Jay-Z: Unplugged is a nice summation of his career, and a nifty companion piece to his similarly solid concert film Fade To Black, which also featured The Roots as an overqualified backing band.
Jay-Z is a relative anomaly among rappers of his stature in that he's never made much of an effort to cross over to the big screen, but he contributed a cameo appearance to 2003's Death Of A Dynasty, a silly little vanity project that history has rendered deeply ironic. The glib satire follows a hapless white hip-hop reporter (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) as he plunges into the glitzy high life of Roc-A-Fella records. Moss-Bachrach's sleazy crimes against journalism threaten to drive a wedge between Jay-Z (played by Robert Stapleton) and head honcho (and Death Of A Dynasty director) Damon Dash, until a last-minute reversal illustrates that Jay-Z and Dash were manipulating Moss-Bachrach all along. Dash and Jay-Z climactically break the fourth wall by appearing as themselves to assure audiences that Roc-A-Fella was forever, and Jay-Z and Dash's partnership would never end. Shortly afterward, Jay-Z and Dash's partnership ended, bitterly and publicly. Unless, of course, it's all an elaborate Death Of A Dynasty-like ruse.
Demerits:
The Best Of Both Worlds: It must have looked good on paper—one of rap's biggest names joining forces with a R&B icon for an entire album—but 2002's ironically titled The Best Of Both Worlds was doomed from inception by lyrical emptiness, lack of chemistry, and the perverse decision to enlist pop-rap schlockmeisters the Trackmasters for primary production. Sadly, though predictably, that production is as generic and forgettable as Jay-Z and Kelly's sleepwalking contributions. Best's underperformance with critics and audiences somehow didn't keep the less-than-dynamic duo from becoming repeat offenders with…
Unfinished Business: For a smart businessman, Jay-Z can make some staggeringly boneheaded moves, like releasing a follow-up to a collaboration no one liked in the first place. 2004's Unfinished Business reunited Jay-Z and R. Kelly for another forgettable exercise in soulless hip-hop/R&B fusion. The whole regrettable endeavor seemed like little more than an excuse to send the pair on a lucrative joint tour, but even that proved a legendary disaster after fighting between the pop stars' camps led to cancellations and a flurry of legal activity. That should at least keep Jay-Z and Kelly from subjecting fans to a third disastrous joint. The public decided that, album title to the contrary, Jay-Z and Kelly were definitely finished, at least as a collaborative entity.
- Comments