The Blueprint Review

The instruction was to strip everything back, and what came out was an album with a single rap guest on it and a production style that changed the market. Kanye West and Just Blaze made more than half of it from sped up soul, live drums and horns, with a warmth the shiny suit era had bleached out, and the record brought sampling back as the dominant sound in rap, pushing aside the keyboard beats that had ruled before it.

Takeover is the assassination, a Doors loop under verses aimed at Prodigy and Nas, and it escalated one of the biggest rivalries of its day. Izzo flips the Jackson 5 into the pop record that does not condescend. Song Cry is the most emotionally honest thing he had recorded, and Heart of the City speeds up Bobby Bland into the template for the whole sound. The writing is not as dense as the debut's and it does not need to be, because the delivery has become effortless: this is the most confident he ever sounded, and the mood never breaks across the hour.

The sound and that confidence carry the S. The lyrics stop at an A and the back half is lighter than the front, but nothing on it coasts long enough to matter, and half the rap released between 2002 and 2006 is trying to be this. In 2018 the Library of Congress chose it for the National Recording Registry, the first recording made this century to be preserved there.