Jay-Z's Blueprint 3

As his eleventh studio album, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3 illustrates the rappers continuous appeal to mainstream audiences and rap enthusiasts alike. Unlike Jay-Z's prior discography, which has consistently provided listeners with a hip-hop outlet for lyrical substance and intelligent sub context, The Blueprint 3 not only fails in providing listeners with either of these attributes, but compromises Jay-Z’s hard earned rap-revolutionary image.

The Blueprint 3 plays like a Lil Wayne album, with more tracks existing as tailor-made singles than components of a cohesive LP. Tracks which have garnered wide attention from top forty stations such as "Empire State of Mind" transform Jay-Z's lyrically strong persona into a commercial hit-maker, a mercenary more concerned with airplay than his original appeal as a true hip-hop artist devoid of the desire for super stardom (only garnering it as a latent function of his original body of work). While tracks such as "Death of Autotune" contain subject matter denouncing commercial trends, the subject matter is only skin deep, with forced lyrics and a pop inspired beat bundled in "hip-hop revolution" labeled packaging.

Jay-Z's latest release is entertaining, and it manages to maintain its audience's attention throughout the album, but it fails to communicate Jay-Z's intended image as a hip-hop mogul and revolutionary.