![]() ![]() Lead single “Bonnie and Clyde 03” borrows exclusively from 2Pac’s “Me and My Girlfriend,” an irony in itself as Pac called him a “corny sounding mother*cker” on that very album. “The Watcher 2.0” is predictably a redub of the opening track on “Chronic 2001,” but at least Dre shows up for a verse. Opener “A Dream” features a gorgeous Kanye beat, yet most of the song is Biggie Small’s “Juicy,” not exactly quelling Nas’ claims that Jigga made his paper by riding Biggie’s corpse into the sunset. 3 of the first 4 tracks on the first disc are direct borrows from another artist. The main problem is it’s mostly forgettable and finds Jigga hopelessly scrounging for ideas. To Hov’s credit, this was his 7th album in 7 years, not counting the acoustic release that gapped between Blueprints, and the fact he put out a 25 track album that mostly doesn’t suck is somewhat commendable. One could argue that it is even more consistent, as while there are very few tracks that are “Player Hater” or “What’s Your Phone Number” awful, absolutely none of it will blow your mind, something that about 75% of the original Blueprint clearly did. “The Blueprint 2” is not like this in any sense. In short, all of those albums would have been classics in their own right had they been pared to one disc. Pac, Big, Wu-Tang’s double cash grabbing monoliths were all marked by the distinct feature they all brandished a respectable list of inarguably killer songs, mired by an absolute avalanche of horrendously sh*tty filler. The difference between the “Blueprint 2” and the aforementioned contemporaries is that it is far less interesting and more frustratingly average. Predictably, these albums sold, and mission was steadily accomplished. When you drop a landmark like the original “Blueprint,” “36 Chambers,” “Ready to Die,” and “Me Against the World” and have pretty much every industry lap dog and Hip Hop fan riding your dick like an up and coming Tara Reid in a producers audition trailer, it’ not hard to see why one would attempt to ride that collective good worth into a mother*ckin paper chase. “The Blueprint 2” shares similarities with Pac’s “All Eyez On Me,” Big’s “Life After Death,” and Wu-Tangs “Forever” in the sense that it is a double album that directly follows an undisputable, top 100 Hip Hop album of all time classic. Owing to his unquenchable thirst for dollars and his reverence to Biggie and Pac, Hov dropped the patented “I just made an inarguable Hip Hop classic and now I’m going to follow it up with a double disc because it’s going to cost $7 more per album and people are still buying CD’s and it’s going to make me even more ridiculously rich and who really gives a sh*t if a sizeable portion of it would have been laughed out of the room in the recording session for my last album.” Ladies and gentlemen, we give you “The Blueprint 2.” On the subject of egos, if Dante had laid out a treatise on the 7 levels of pure, unadulterated arrogance, Jay–Z stands alone in a genre that is at least 63% about boasting, regardless of whether it’s about how many hoes are owned, how many G’s have been clocked by that artists trigger finger, or exactly how filthy God Damn rich that individual is. If an artist is good enough, we’ll buy their sh*t, even if the latest product is clearly designed to glean more dollars and has a high likelihood of suffering from an incomprehensible level of bloat, a direct correlation to the artists’ respective overpowering egos. We know this whether or not we truly accept it, but some artists have enough clout where it really doesn’t matter. If it weren’t already blatantly obvious, double albums are absolutely, unequivocally, and without retort nothing more than a cash grabbing tactic. ![]() Review Summary: Jigga follows up a landmark classic with a not-unpleasant effort that is the definition of average.
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