Obviously if you never liked that "Fiesta" cut in the first place, the release of this album was not something you were looking for. But if you look at this unprejudiced, then it still is exciting in theory, as two major artists, successful and then some, connect to do one album, where they intend to combine their two styles to come up with a result that's at least as big as the sum of its parts. However, if you look at this closely, you'll quickly learn that there are too many things that prevent this from being much more than the hype of the year, that ends up being as tragic as The Firm disaster. Cause what you suddenly get is R.Kelly struggling from his weak voice, that for good reason is backed up by a huge frickin' choir on most of his hits. And you get a Jay-Z restraining himself to only rhyme about nothing that needs his creativity. So in total, what you get here is straight up boring.

Cause what they try to do here is span this one hit that gave 'em the idea to do this, over one album, and to play it save in the mean time. What means that the Trackmasters and R.Kelly are hooking up a bundle of tracks that are thoroughly pop, what will make sure that the quieted anti-Trackmasters rants will be reinstated. And Jay-Z is getting his servings from a rather crappy all you can eat buffet, where it does not matter how much you pile on your plates, it can never be of the value that you paid at the door. Just a quick look at the tracklisting will give you a quick shudder too: "Get This Money", "Shorty", "Honey", "Pussy", "Naked" and "The Streets". With the last one, actually being one of the best songs on here: The beat is bubble gum, but the lyrics are touching upon deeper topics: "before I knew it, had my pops trousers on / that's how we do it when the man of the house is gone / you either, stand or fall, I chose to stand / the hawk outside, so I blow my hand / it's a cold, cold world but I overstand / tryin' to stay focused but I feel hopeless damn / can't cope with bein' broke, I'm a man".

Besides this cut we need to dig deep to find more moments that we are minimally entertaining. One of those is the beat on "Break Up To Make Up", that while too enormously stereotypical in the way it's done, with a heard before guitar and those annoying alibi scratches. But it still got a certain groove that's okay. The lyrics feature some of these very, very low points though, when R.Kelly sings: "you and me, havin' sex / after an argument, that shit's the best" while one verse goes: "when shit hit the fan / said, 'You never spend timey, what's up with that?' / translated it means: 'hit it hard from the back' / yeah she hid my car keys / and forced me to fall asleep to her heartbeat". The beat on "Honey" does feature a remote Philly groove, what also makes this bearable and finally "Pussy" feat. Devin The Dude contains a little comic relieve in the lyrics, as well as a somewhat bluesy beat that not surprisingly is done by Charlemagne, and that offers differentness we are thankful for.

But the rest? Just a prototype for all future criticism about what's so bad when Rap cats get more R'n'B and when R'n'B cats get more Rap. And so to go for an easy diss: if this is the best of both worlds, we don't want to hear the rest of those worlds.