NYT think piece on Watch the Throne

TAKE OF THE DAY: “This isn’t excess for excess’s sake. It’s the state of being so rich you forgot where you put all your nice things, being so rich you lost sight of which stuff is actually nice and which stuff you bought just because you’re used to buying things. Meaningful references—the abundant James Brown samples, the use of Redding and Mayfield—are all jumbled with irrelevant ones. But that confusion is a sort of victory here. Instead of a monolithic mandate delivered from on high, Watch the Throne delivers something more splintered and haphazard, a legitimate engagement with what it means to be new, in the now. It’s a small record by big men with nothing to lose but bigness itself.” —the payoff of “Two Titans Share the Seat of Power,” Jon Caramanica’s excellent think piece on the Jay-Z/Kanye West collab, in the N.Y. Times. (8/11a)