It's easy-listening because his life is almost entirely easy living, and his only nuisances (bitch-ass rappers and the media, naturally) are shortly addressed in two quick jabs: laid-back dis track and Eminem guest shot. Disregarding 'Takeover' (which is a separate world, anyway), he's left behind all the dirty funk of so many jams past too powerful, too rich, too fucking refined to even be touched by such filthiness.

They're wielded like pieces of a glitch track around Jay's words, coming in at all the right moments and corporealizing into a clipped skeleton to drape his ego on.

The unexpected flourishes are subtly beneficial, like the fanfare that sneaks in at the end of 'All I Need,' or the incredible clap-clap break of 'Heart of the City.' Retro soul samples are dull white, picked clean of lint and sanitized. The songs are spare, but the care of assembly holds any leftover interest that Jay isn't already commanding. The Blueprint is possibly the least sonically inventive hip-hop chart topper in years- stunning and captivating for sure, but still loungily comfortable enough to sleep to. What I got was the plush defining statement from hip-hop's last great personality. Honestly, I was expecting mediocre shit- the worst kind of boredom that comes with return-to-my-roots formalism, or maybe a chorus or two from a children's musical. Approaching a Jay-Z album in a cultural vacuum is a dangerous venture- something I haven't done since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt- and my hopes were a lot lower for this new one, which was rumored to be short on bigger-than-Jesus superproducers and entirely free of perpetual Roc-a-Fella sidemen Beans and Bleek (both of whom I've come to like far better than Jay himself). I was so deprived that when Nas pondered if Jay-Z might be 'H to the izzo/ M to the izzo,' I didn't even get the damned reference. I'm too far from ATL to get good radio, and the only thing bumping out the trunk at stoplights was that fucking White Stripes album. 'H to the Izzo' wasn't a summer jam for me.

The blueprint album zip