Word: kingdom
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...real attempts at acknowledging his place in rap and in life on "30 Something" ("I don't got one gun on me / Gotta a sum on me to hire a gun army / Getcha spun like laundry / And I'll be somewhere under palm trees / Calmly listenin' to R&B") Kingdom Come seems destined to become rap's first genuinely adult album. But those moments are just flashes between Jay telling rap's new kids to get off his lawn and reminding the rest of us of that he's still a thug at heart-that he hasn't changed...
...when he announced his retirement in 2003. Then 34, he had lived the ur-rap narrative-make tapes, launch a label, buy a De Beers mine-and bragged about it on a dozen often brilliant albums. But no rapper is immune to the pull of the mic, and on Kingdom Come, his heavily hyped comeback, Jay-Z tries to subvert the problem of having said everything by saying everything a little differently. Where once his delivery had the ring-a-ding-ding smoothness of Sinatra-another vocalist who made callousness seem like charm-Jay recognizes that, at 37, with...
...more complex—at least formally—than even Bob Dylan. Where he weaved stories on an intricate but predictable meter, Newsom spins an ever-evolving sequence of rhyme schemes. In “Emily,” she paints an organic tale of a dying kingdom, and the swoop and pull of the orchestration (arranged by Van Dyke Parks) makes it sound like an apocalyptic dirge from another planet. “Monkey & Bear” is more in the vein of medieval balladry, its anthropomorphized title characters undertaking an epic journey with lute-like accompaniment...
...relationship is one marked by post-performance pill popping, thrown punches, and Robbie’s infidelity with ingénue corps member Sandra. The collection’s expansive cast of dancers all exhibit very human frailties, struggling with eating disorders (“In the Kingdom of the Shades”), flirting with drug use (“Wili”), and succumbing to AIDS (“Departure?...
...billionaire cell-phone entrepreneur has promised millions of dollars to chosen African heads of state—and has given a Harvard lecturer the power to influence the selection. Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese cell phone entrepreneur based in the United Kingdom, recently announced plans to offer a $5 million award to a retired sub-Saharan African head of state who he determines has demonstrated good governance while in office and democratically ceded his position to his successor. That amount is the largest prize the world has seen yet, surpassing the $1.3 million of this year’s 2006 Nobel...