"Damn right I love this life I live/ 'Cause I went from negative to positive/ And it's all... good." --Biggie Smalls, "Juicy"

"H to the Izzo" wasn't a summer jam for me. No TV, sadly, means no BET. 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. 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. 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). 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. What I got was the plush defining statement from hip-hop's last great personality.

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. The songs are spare, but the care of assembly holds any leftover interest that Jay isn't already commanding. 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. 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. 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. 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.

"Takeover" is the dis track. Casually flowing over a marching bassline and carbonated harpsichord flourishes, Jay slowly and confidently explains to you that Nas and Mobb Deep's Prodigy are the most wack, fake-ass thugs in the universe, and how he must destroy them. After it ends, you realize he was simply performing an obligation-- responding to a glove slap that's far beneath him, but entirely within his capacity to address. The abrupt final verse is the topper as Jay laughingly exhorts that, "All you other cats throwin' shots at Jigga/ You only get half a bar, fuck y'all, niggaz." How does Jadakiss even begin to respond at that?

As for the rest, well, there's nothing really awful (the cringeworthy track or two that seems to lurk at the end of every Jay-Z album is notably absent), but there's nothing really shocking, either. But the other tracks are so forward-moving and hallucinatory that even Timbaland can't stab his way out of the haze. What holds it together is Jigga's overwhelming self-assuredness-- the kind of justified confidence you can imagine witnessing from a world conqueror or cult leader. When the pitchshifted chorus of "U Don't Know" exclaims, "You don't know... what you're doing," Jay is quick to respond: "Sure, I do." He then goes on to casually add up his yearly earnings and ponder the total like Mos circa Mathematics if possessed by Gordon Gekko, and you realize that this is for real: Shawn Carter finally entirely synchronized with the Jigga-man rapping persona for an entire album.

Gradually, the other tracks start to make sense; "Hola Hovito" is a Swizz Beatz eulogy with Roger Troutman shouting nonsense from the bathroom. "Jigga That Nigga" is all the lovely French females from "Girls, Girls, Girls" asking him to kick it 1998-style once again. "Heart of the City," possibly the best song that actually works in the style of the album, deftly grinds with tiptoeing smoothness like a bugged-out Cluster track while Jay makes a convincing case for holding it down six summers straight. "Niggaz pray and pray on my downfall/ But every time I hit the ground I bounce up like round ball."

Bouncing up means coming down, and he does for "Renegade," teaming with the world's other greatest MC to whine about the perils of being the world's greatest MCs and all. I shouldn't have to mention the brilliant rhymes, but (surprisingly, after a few bombs on the d12 album) it's almost ridiculous how good Eminem's beat is-- strings, synth and "Good Vibrations"-style theremin tones roll easy like 1987. After that, Jay puts focus in full on his rep, bigging up Reasonable Doubt more times than every other cut of his career combined. Jay's always been moving towards abolishing the hardcore production style that originally went with being gangsta, but the funny thing about this is how overwhelmingly post-gangsta he is-- the fruits of a thug life that was too long ago to dwell on.

"If I ain't better than B.I.G./ I'm the closest one," he says on "Hola Hovito," and that's an important clarification; when Puffy and Easy Mo Bee were laying pop beats under Biggie's real-life crime stories, the old school heads complained about how the rugged and rough aesthetic was on the way out. But "Juicy" shut the haters up by simply explaining that Biggie was pop only because he didn't need that dirty funk-rock life anymore. And so, while frat boys went buckwild for screeching thugs like Cypress Hill and Onyx who boasted of a running crime rate, Biggie had already gotten over it and just wanted to live his life in peace. But everyone knows what actually happened, and after his crime style finally caught up with him, the new generation of pop thug was ushered in. After Biggie's death, no one comes closer than Jay-Z.