It's a celebration, bitches

I'm baffled by complaints about Kanye's "ego problem," especially when as indentured servant to noted humble scion Sean Carter his productions swelled the latter's conception of himself like buttresses in a cathedral. Maybe people mean that Kanye's flow isn't good enough, which is to say that at worst his inadequacies render his contorted confessions as monstrously messianic as Bono's. A man who pens a couplet like, "Big Brother saw me at the bottom of the totem/Now I'm on the top and every body on the scrotum" has issues that Lance Bass is too boring to address.

His architecture stable and familiar enough thanks to the return of stable, familiar builders like Just Blaze and Kanye, the firm of Sean Carter can take immense satisfaction in promoting American Gangster. I get off on how great it sounds -- on an sonic level this is akin to a Pixar entertainment. When I'm paying so much for mainstream entertainment, I demand the deluxe treatment. As a back-to-basics move it's closer to The Blueprint than Reasonable Doubt, the latter of which bears the same relationship to Jay-Z's work as Run DMC does to Raising Hell: musicians often mistake spareness with "timelessness" (think of the retired "Unplugged" canard), and are therefore apt to overrate work made in comparative poverty whose aspirations can't match the results. The ominous, churning "Pray" hooked me from its first notes, and it allows Beyonce her most frightening vocal since "Bootylicious," which is to say she (and Jay-Z) don't project yearning so much as demand your abject worship. As a declaration of genius, "No Hook" is gentler and hence humbler than The Black Album's psychobabble-courting "Moment of Clarity"; if I were Ludacris, I wouldn't feel insulted. Think of it this way: if Bryan Ferry pulls me into a foyer and, haltingly, sadly, reminds me that white socks are, erm, not appropriate, old chap, at dinner parties, I'd remember the unease borne of good manners, not the fashion advice.

Even the album title's self-parody induces no groans, as it might have (and should have, maybe) in 2003. Context is all, and Jay-Z knows enough about how albums work to understand that craftsmen, like the veterans they are, no longer stumble into moments; they coordinate them after feeling the pulse of the populace. Fortunately, Jay-Z's also enough of a popular artist to realize that craftsmen must position the showroom lights in different places to create the illusion of novelty. A friend called American Gangster "Jay-Z's Some Girls." It's closer to Tattoo You, whose creators divided into fast ones-on-the-A-slow-ones-on-the-B and included a couple of sops to friendship and humility, two virtues plenty available in their older work if you were listening hard enough. Christgau's begrudging praise of the Stones album may as well be aimed at American Gangster: "But where The Blueprint had impact as a Jay-Z record, a major statement by an entrepeneur with something to state, the satisfactions here are stylistic -- beats, flow, momentum. And the artist isn't getting any less mean-spirited as he pushes forty."