Kingdom Come – Jay-Z

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2006	Kingdom Come	Jay-Z	★★½	51	Hip-Hop

After a three-year “retirement,” Jay Z returned in 2006 with Kingdom Come, a record that sounds exactly of its time in both good and bad ways. 

The production across Kingdom Come relies heavily on catchy, cleaned up samples of live instruments like trumpet, strings and melodic piano lines. The beats by Just Blaze and Kanye West sound pretty smooth and detailed, compared to the more straightforward, a bit heavier Dr. Dre beats scattered across the album that still have a consistent, manicured feel to them.   

Jay Z lyrically here doesn’t have quite as much of the punch as he once did. There’s a lot of fine lines bragging about his status and he sounds like he’s matured with his age beyond some of the more  street-level stories and rhymes he used to be associated with, but the creative dip lyrically and flow-wise compared even to The Black Album in 2003 is pretty noticeable. It feels like somebody who, over the years, has figured out a formula that works for him that he knows will sell without pushing the envelope.

Still, he can make songs that are really energized and fun, as the opening five songs display here.  “Oh My God” and the title track are these big, epic, in-your-face tracks that make you feel like you’re in a gangster movie title screen. “Show Me What You’ve Got” has a smooth saxophone and horn part that feels like you’re flying in a speedboat. “Lost One” follows that with a nice ballad with some good backing vocals and soft pianos for a more heartfelt moment. 

From there, it’s a mixed bag, with a lot of tracks that are forgettable. John Legend sounds good on “Do U Wanna Ride,” which was produced by Kanye West.  “Anything” has a cool Neptunes beat and fine Usher feature. “Dig a Hole” is laughably bad and “Minority Report” is lame and dated, with the latter incorporating news clips about Hurricane Katrina in a way that feels really forced and not at all clever or authentically sentimental at all.

I actually do enjoy the closing track “Beach Chair,” which is a weird, out-of-place non-single featuring Chris Martin from Coldplay on the hook. It’s got this cool, booming bass and clapping that echoes in a grand, larger-than-life way to complement Martin’s anthemic chorus, and Jay sounds pretty solid as well.

 It just isn’t old Jay-Z, and it shows how commercialized he and his contemporaries have become over the past decade compared to a song like “(Always Be My) Sunshine” which — when it was released in 1997 — was kind of considered a turn towards radio because of it’s Babyface feature and clean production. But that feels so much more of an authentic match compared to Martin, who was one of the biggest pop and rock superstars of the 2000s and is more a trophy of Jay’s achieved status than a necessary hip-hop element.