Something that both Kanye and Jay-Z do very well indeed is big themselves up. It’s for this reason that they rub quite a few people up the wrong way, but as I’m someone whose head is so massively over-inflated that it’s a surprise I can fit it through corridors, I love how much they love themselves. And when you have this much swag, why shouldn’t you rate yourself a little bit?
This song is a massive backpat; Kanye bigging himself up (“I made Jesus Walks so I’m never going to hell”), Jay-Z bigging himself up (“Or the big face Rollie I got two of those”) and both stroking each other’s egos as well. It would irk a lot of people, but the sampling of Otis Redding's Try a little Tenderness is probably one of the finest usages of sampling another song Kanye West has done, second only to the usage of Ray Charles’ I Got a Woman in Goldigga.
Some of the wordplay really clicks, “Sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive” and my favourite big-headed line of them all: “Photoshoot fresh, looking like wealth, I’m about to pull the paparazzi on myself”. Ah, how the other half do live.
