What's The Consensus? Rap Critics Debate "Watch The Throne" vs "Take Care"

The Internet's top tastemakers decide which album is better, Drake's sophomore set or Jay-Z and Kanye West's epic collaboration.

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Image via Complex Original
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Intro

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HHDX

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Panelist: Kathy Iandoli, HipHopDX

Watch The Throne and Take Care sound like they are the before and after of one another. The former, being the reckless young adults having fun, and the latter being the pensive regretful aftermath of it all. The only problem is Kanye West and Jay-Z are in their 30s and 40s respectively and Drake is the one in his 20s. Something isn’t right here.

While it’s true that on WTT, Jay and Ye have some degree of thoughtfulness going on (i.e. “New Day,” “No Church In the Wild,” etc.) for the most part we’re learning about who Martin Margiela is (“N***as In Paris”) and watching the dynamic duo strip down a Maybach in the “Otis” video and do donuts with it, while girls in the backseat are screaming. Shouldn’t Drake be having that kind of fun? Instead he’d be the one complaining that since there’s no roof on the Maybach his hair is getting cold.

If we’re going to hear about living luxuriously, I’d rather it be on the positive than the negative. Besides, Jay-Z and Kanye West gave us plenty of designers to Google after Watch The Throne. The only thing Drake gave us to Google are the side-effects of Lexapro.

Advantage: Watch The Throne

Watch The Throne: 1 | Take Care: 0

ego trip

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Panelist: ego trip, ego trip

Take Care and Watch The Throne are both so awesome, yet awesomely different. Trying to decide which one is better is like comparing one incredibly luxurious alligator skin hand-stitched-with-elfin-magic apple with one unbelievably forlorn-like-a-frowning-sunset yet ultimately endearing and captivating orange. Each is superior to the other depending on the context. For instance, which album is better for…

Crying in the experience shower. With a friend: TC

A golden shower. With actual gold: WTT

Pepper-spraying fools at a Black Friday sale for those new kicks: WTT

Spraying body wash on yourself like a fool just for kicks: TC

Relating to young women: TC

Paying for young prostitutes: WTT

Sippin’ ancient herbal organic alabaster Indochine tea, and reading the Robb Report on 3K thread count Egyptian slave cotton sheets: WTT

Treating your mangina to a holiday. Or douching: TC

Posting on Tumblr about Twilight while wearing tight jeans: TC

Tweeting something “funny,” and imagining LOLs that don’t exist: WTT

Wearing sunglasses at night (to protect your eyes from ultraviolet sadness): TC

Wiping your ass with Susan B. Anthony silver dollars: WTT

BFF-ing all your BFFs: TC

Reaffirming the absolute truth that when you die the world will end: WTT

WINNER: WTT by a hair. Because… actually, we just flipped a coin.

Re-live the odyssey of ego trip’s in-depth coverage of WTT, HERE.

Re-visit the visual feast that is ego trip’s Take Care album cover remixes, HERE. Oh, and HERE too.

Advantage: Watch The Throne

Watch The Throne: 2 | Take Care: 0

FakeShoreDrive

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Panelist: Andrew Barber, FakeShoreDrive

Weeks before WTT dropped, you couldn't log on to the Internets without reading or hearing someone gushing about Ye and Jay's collaborative effort. Whether it was praise for thwarting would-be leaks (genius!), or a video featuring a sliced up Maybach (groundbreaking!), the dynamic duo could do no wrong. But once the album dropped and the smoke cleared, the chatter stopped. What everyone deemed classic had pretty much been forgotten—with the exception of the insanely popular "Paris."

WTT was then toppled and trumped by Wayne's Carter IV and Drake's Take Care from a sales perspective. But neither C4 or Take Care were as good as Watch The Throne. Sure, "Look What You've Done" was more heartfelt and sincere than "New Day," but nothing on Take Care (with the exception of the bonus track "The Motto," which has insane potential) stacks up against "Paris," or "Gotta Have It" from a club banger (I hate that term) perspective. Plus "Murder To Excellence" >>>

While Watch The Throne failed to set the world on fire the way we hoped, it was pound for pound, an all around better HIP-HOP album than Take Care. Perhaps you should go back and revisit.

Advantage: Watch The Throne

Watch The Throne: 3 | Take Care: 0

MaskedGorilla

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Panelist: Roger Guerrilla, TheMaskedGorilla

Nostalgia: the “yearning for the past, often in idealized form.” Sounds like a horrible idea to me. Feeling nostalgic keeps us in situations we shouldn’t be in, or even worse, clinging to relationships that are long past their expiration dates. Oh, you thought I was talking about you and your girl? No, Iʼm talking about old hip-hop heads, specifically bloggers, and their relationships with Jay-Z. It’s this same fucked-up, ‘well past the expiration date’ relationship which propels the aforementioned hip-hop heads to dismiss Drake as some new “emo” rapper, who seemingly isnʼt “too hip-hop” after all.

Watch The Throne, in its entirety, (the promotion/ packaging, listening party, the no leaks, that one music video, and the concert series) was an amazing collective piece of artwork. But once you take off the packaging and strip away the hype, was the album as a whole really that great? Eh.

Drakeʼs Take Care was a progressive and cohesive project, which not only perfectly embodies Aubrey as a whole, but has created countless relatable and influential anthems for the younger hip-hop audience. The album possesses endless, full playback value, with a little something for everyone.

True, Watch The Throne had a few hits, and some enjoyable songs. But Take Care may go down as Drakeʼs single greatest effort when itʼs all said and done. Speaking of it being all said and done for a rapper... Hov, put the snapback down, youʼre trying way too hard, bro.

Advantage: Take Care

Watch The Throne: 3 | Take Care: 1

Dallas Penn

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Panelist: Dallas Penn, DallasPenn

Watch The Throne will still influence the rappers who are influenced by the rappers influenced by Take Care. Watch The Throne was a miserably pretentious underacheiving hip-hop project, which is more valuable and honorable to me than a successful pop album. I'd rather some chefs screw up my rap lobster newburgh than if I had some forgettable Wendy's double with fries.

Advantage: Take Care

Watch The Throne: 3 | Take Care: 2

Observer

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Panelist: Foster Kamer, The New York Observer

Yes, Drake's offer to "catch a body like that" is more "pause" than it is a threat of any legitimate stripe, as opposed to, say, "Bag Jackin' Bitches." But at least he's trying. Jay offering to murk someone in the lobby of SoHo's Mercer Hotel for 'Ye is on some babysitter shit, and guess what: If Jay and Kanye wanted, they could have the Sultan of Bernai babysit for them! While they have unprotected sex with his daughter!

Or so goes the unmitigated bombast of WTT, best described by Alex Pappademas in GQ as an album "on which two grandiose motherfuckers explore the theme of grandiose-motherfuckerdom." So it goes, and this is an achievement in and of itself. Yet: Somewhere between Kanye's nine variations on "HAH?!??" and "new watch alert" and Kanye waxing poetic on the Holocaust, my enthusiasm was lost. Is "Niggas In Paris" really so great that they need to play it six times in one concert? No song is that great. It's almost as equal in musical sin to playing thirty seconds of "Party Rock Anthem" anywhere. Again: "Grandiose motherfuckerdom."

There was a brief phase in dining where everyone was putting truffles on everything. Truffles are a rich, strong taste, but it doesn't take a genius to make a great dish with them. You could shave truffles over a Whopper Jr. and it'd taste incredible, just like you can take two superpowers and let them produce unmitigated boom-bap hits while repeatedly emphasizing how extraordinary they are. The effect was numbing to the point of disillusionment.

And here I'd make a case for how truly great I think Take Care is, or what possibilities 40's producing opens up for hip-hop—a new evolution of subtly in the form, for one thing—or why this album was both as surprising as it was long overdue and delivered. But let's just leave it as Ross' verse and Blaze's beat for "Lord Knows." If those are only one set of this album's accoutrements, and the rest falls below it, the standard for accomplishment still rises higher than that of what Jay or 'Ye did on Watch The Throne. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing, bodies caught withstanding.

Advantage: Take Care

Watch The Throne: 3 | Take Care: 3

Pigeons and Planes

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Panelist: Confusion, Pigeons and Planes

It's hard to even talk about Watch The Throne without focusing on Kanye. As much of a legend as Jay-Z is, and as much as he brings to WTT, Ye was the real driving force behind the album. When you compare Drake to Kanye West, it's one of those apple/orange situations.

The first Drake line that ever struck me was, ironically, over a Kanye West beat. It's a simple line, but one that so perfectly captured what I think should be the ambition of any artist. On "Say What's Real," off Aubrey's So Far Gone mixtape, he says, "Don't ever forget the moment you began to doubt/Transitioning from fitting in to standing out." You can argue that Drake's always stood out—and in some ways you'd be right—but he's never done it as confidently as on Take Care. It's a turning point for Drake. He's spent years cultivating and perfecting his sound and the way he conveys his personality, and this album is like the epiphany-featuring turning point in a coming-of-age novel.

Kanye, on the other hand, has never had an issue with confidence, and he’s never had a problem moving forward (musically, at least). Instead of working on perfecting one sound, he drops near-perfect album after near-perfect album and moves on. Instead of treating albums like chapters in a book, each project stands as its own story. WTT is not a defining moment for Kanye or Jay, and it's not a point that they've been working towards and building up to their entire careers. It’s just another great story.

For me, it all boils down to the book/chapter thing. Drake has delivered a really important chapter in his story. It was a great read, and it's done its job with character development and advancing the plot. But as important as it is for Drake, it still isn’t as fulfilling as Watch The Throne.

Advantage: Watch The Throne

Watch The Throne: 4 | Take Care: 3

Combat Jack

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Complex

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Panelist: Noah Callahan-Bever, Complex

This is a case of the micro versus the macro, and at times vice-versa.

Drake’s sophomore effort, Take Care, with all its fraught introspection, will stand as one of rap’s great works of self-analysis, along with The Marshall Mathers LP and The Blueprint. Over the course of the LP’s many, many, many songs (more on that in a bit) Drake oscillates lyrically between macho chest-beating, boasting of his accomplishments, and emotional cutting—reveling in masochistic self-flagellation for his shortcomings. Songs like “HYFR” and “Over My Dead Body” perfectly balance the two. Whether you find him, as an artist, to be authentic or hollow, it’s undeniable that Drake makes a valiant effort throughout Take Care to find understanding and emotional resonance with the listener. And he’s largely successful—one cannot listen to songs like "Marvins Room" or "Take Care" without being left with a very specific feeling of knowing who Drake is in his heart. The album’s only shortcomings are its sprawling length (some songs overlap, topically) and the very occasionally cringe-worthy line (“It’s my birthday, I’ll get high if I want to...”). 

On the flipside, Jay-Z and Kanye West approach Watch the Throne from a broader perspective, taking their well-known personal narratives and juxtaposing them with each other, and then—more than either ever has in their solo works—placing them in the context of race and class in America. For an album with the potential to be so fragmented, WTT is a triumph of focus. Every single song, from “No Church In the Wild” to “Who Gon’ Stop Me” to “New Day” to “N****s In Paris” (just think about the title!), is forged, sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly, around the theme of what it means—both for them personally, and for their community—to be successful Black men in America. This thematic unity is only highlighted by the ruthless editing exercised by the musically mature duo, who kept the album to a trump-tight 12 tracks.

Both are great records, meant to be enjoyed in different ways and at different times, and we, the audience, win for having the two options. Having said that, in terms of ambition, while Drake certainly dug deep and made the best album of his career (yet), neither his efforts nor his findings are wholly unique. What Kanye and Jay have done has never been attempted before, nor has it ever been executed so exquisitely. To me, at least.

Advantage: Watch The Throne

Watch The Throne: 6 | Take Care: 3

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