It hosts the hotel for the jet setting. Where Rihanna checks in. It hosts the house of Hollywood love stories. Where Katy Perry and Russell Brand set up home. It’s Tribeca. Where the kings of rap make their throne.

Tribeca Grand Hotel in Tribeca, New York New York is one of the places in which new collaborative album from Jay Z and Kanye West was recorded. Watch The Throne was released on 8th August this year and the collaboration was originally intended to spawn a few singles like the duo did with SwaggaLike Us, Run This Town and Monster.

Instead, after recordings in Australia, Hawaii, Paris and England, it was released as a full length album with 12 tracks. The songs on the album sample two great African American soul artists with Ottis Reading and James Brown. From greatness to greatness to Z-Westness…or from ego to ego to ego…depending on how you look at it.Jay-Z calls it an ‘investigation into black greatness’.

But it’s not an ‘investigation’ because that’s just a process that verifies only after questioning. And there is no question that West, Jigga Man and the greats they sample, and play with like The Neptunes, are the trophy boys of ‘black greatness’.

And that’s basically what the album is about – greatness of overcoming poverty and dreaming big (Welcome to the Jungle); of leaving a legacy behind (New Day); of living it up in the capital of White fame (Niggas in Paris); and the greatness of knowing the limits of your greatness (Lift Off).

West could easily be considered the Mick Jagger of Rap but with the ability to still manufacture hits and not just attitude (no disrespect to the iconship ofJagger). And Jay-Z is the smiling cat of a wonderland of hip hop genius – grinning with ideas, and stealthily running the town. Watch this throne and learn how rap is done, without the shining grills and shoot-outs and mother-hating – the rap of kings.

The debut release of the album was H.A.M., which was released at the start of this year, followed by Otis, which the duo performed live at the VMAs.

Lyrically the album spews catchy lines about dog-worn themes like power and racism, America, and of course, Maybachs. The delivery is old-school hip hop where Jay-Z and West alternatively rap like a dialogue, and sometimes trying to argue with each other and sometimes just trying to show how different each is from the other.

On Gotta Have It, West tries to convince Jay-Z that you don’t need to be a thug to be ‘planking on a million’; New Day is a confession to the unborn, with West promising his kids of someday that he’ll make his wrongs into right through them and Jay-Z promising his kid who was first introduced to the world on stage, that the kid’s just going to have to accept that his daddy’s fame and celebrity has already ruined him, ‘("You ain't even alive, paparazzi pusuin' ya"). Well Jay-Z, don’t introduce the fella at the VMAs if you don’t want a camera on your wife’s belly. But there is some Will Smith like advice to junior from Jigga Man – something along the lines about giving your word and keeping it. Guess there isn’t much point to a throne if you don’t have an heir.Word.

Church of the Wild features a sped up sample from guitarist Phil Manzanera’s 1978 K-Scope. It’s not the presence of white man Manzanera (OK so he’s half Columbian) that’s bizarre on this track – it’s West’s outburst of animal-like screams and growls. A prelude apparently to the next track Welcome to the Jungle.

No it does not sample the Guns n’ Roses. Welcome to the Jungle is about surviving the tough times of working ‘pots and pans, just to get…some Airs’. Incidentally the Airs Jay-Z is seen wearing (on the videoclip to Otis for example) are the shoes that even Michael Jordan wasn’t allowed to wear – Air Jordan 1 ‘Banned’ (Jordan was banned from wearing them because they didn’t match NBA court dress code). Guess there’s still a little law not-abiding thug in Jigga after all. 65$ for shoes must’ve cost the hell’s kitchen of pots and pans.

On the song, Jay-Z’ and West take you to a jungle that is not as dark as Axl Rose’s take of the world but an anguish-struck impression of poverty, ‘I asked her where she wanna be when she 25.She turned around and looked at me and said “alive”’, raps Kanye. There is a mention of a ‘black Axl Rose’ by Jay-Z in the song, although if you asked us, the best moment when a white celebrity was made black by a rapper was when Kanye invented the ‘black kate moss’ on Stronger.

Rolling in the Deep has become the new famous words in music for the consuming ways of love…since the last famous few words of irresistible desire, ‘it’s a quarter after 1.’

There has been much debate as to the meaning of the phrase Rolling in the Deep in Adele Atkins hit– is it just British slang, asks the American; no it’s just poetic imagery, replies the Brit. Some say it refers to the potential that the relationship between Adele and her boyfriend had; others say it’s just about the ocean of grief in which Adele wrote this song and much of her album. Yes the album is a break-up album. But the best ones always are. Sometimes they even bring back your man, just ask Pink.

The song is an interesting combination of wailing passion for a great love with harsh threats sung with a dramatic choral effect. Adele sings ‘we could have had it all,’ while the choir announces ‘you’re gonna wish you never had met me’. Of course, maybe it isn’t a threat at all. Maybe it just means her ex is going to miss her more than he realizes and its going to ruin him and his ‘tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep.’ Either way the words create an image of the turbulent and addictive chaos of passion and the complications of love that resonates throughout the blues-drenched album.

Rumor Has It, the new release that is currently playing on TNL, is an energetic follow-up to Rolling in the Deep. The song thumps with a Dog Days Are Over like prominent and off-beat drum line that can swing your hips to each speaker in full stereo effect. The chorus, like its predecessor, also has a dramatic choral-like back up vocals that coos with wag-the-finger like admonishment, Rumor Has It.

While He Wont Go has a Sade like hi-hat sultriness, I’ll Be Waiting ForYou taps into a burning rhythm and blues energy and has one of the best melodies on the album. The song starts with a laid back tempo that gets you motioning your head with the jolts and grooviness of Motown, before the whole tune rises up to the rich sound of a soulful chorus.

Adele includes a cover in her album, much like in 19 when she included her piano-driven version of Bob Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love. The cover in 21, is a slow rock-like rendition of The Cure’s Lovesong, that would’ve been a great filler at a concert but is somewhat the vacant spot an otherwise, compact and well-arranged album. .

Turning Tables is a piano-based ballad which reminds us of her beginnings with Chasing Pavements. But the ballad that takes a little piece of your heart is One and Only, as Adele coos, whispers, rasps and fiercely delivers a vocal mosaic of emotion with remarkable maturity for a 21 year old.

Someone Like You is a bittersweet tribute to the love who broke your heart the worst, whom you forgive with the best but cant help but never forget. The kind of heartbreak that Don Henley once spoke to us with, in Heart of the Matter. The kind of heartbreak that makes you think that every person you meet afterwards is just another version of the one you lost. ‘Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead’, Adele sings.

The album picks up pace in Set Fire to the Rain, with Coldplay-like rise and fall of emotions in piano accompaniments with a few moments of throaty earnestness caught up in orchestral like music arrangements, much like the raspy Janis Joplin like vocal antics on Take It All..

Throughout the album, the uniqueness of Adele’s vocals is that it promises an Aretha-like tenacity with a Janis-like feistiness and expressiveness.

Produced by Rick Rubin, Ryan Tedder and Paul Epworth, 21 is an album that can offer different things to different moments. It can be as non-intrusive as background music for simple relaxation, or moving enough for a contemplative moment with music or offer all the right words and melodies for those days when you need the comfort of a perfect stranger.

There’s no clutter in this album, and most of the songs are dominated by Adele’s vocals with usually just a guitar or a piano accompanying her. In fact, the greatness of the album, which like her debut is named after her age, is the way it mostly uses, nothing more than Adele’s vocals to convey a spectrum of emotions – the way something so expressive can be delivered with such simplicity.

Adele hasn’t just done it again, she’s done it better. And maybe there was a time when Adele walked away from a tour for the sake of her boyfriend. But now she walks into her best album yet because of an absent boyfriend.

We thank our mothers for teaching us the practicalities of love; but we could thank our ex’s for getting us the platinums in our album sales.

Rolling in the Deep

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Rumor Has It

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I’ll Be Waiting

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Lovesong

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Set Fire to the Rain

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He Won’t Go

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Someone Like You

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Take it all

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One and Only

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Turning Tables

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Don’t You Remember

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