Jay-Z's Hegemony in the Age of Kanye | Marc Lynch
Watch the Throne then can be seen as a shrewd move to institutionalize Jay-Z’s hegemony in a rapidly shifting and potentially hostile environment through a fully-realized new alliance system. The key moves came years earlier: Jay-Z allowing Kanye to produce Blueprint 3 instead of trying to destroy him after his 2007 diss track “Big Brother”; his signing of key rising stars to Roc Nation and Kanye’s doing the same at GOOD Music; his participation on Kanye’s brilliant GOOD Friday series of free online downloads and on Kanye’s remarkable comeback album My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy; and then finally Watch the Throne.
Foreign Policy on Jay-Z is awesome. (Via @beep.)
