The problem is, and has always been, that Jadakiss just has no commercial instincts he has only the vaguest idea of what a 'hit'sounds like, and reliably associates 'slick and expensive-sounding' with 'a sure thing.' Even worse, his bars on the street cuts, his traditional area of strength, have turned slack and rote. 'Guns gon' clap, packs gon' move/blood get drawn, skin gon'bruise/the real gon' win, the fake gon' lose,' he raps on 'Who's Real', over a tinny Swizz Beatz beat. And it's the reason he's droning 'Go baby, you're so wavy/ I ain't never felt this way about no lady' over Eric Hudson's poor-man's-Rodney-Jerkins back beat on 'By My Side' alongside Ne-Yo. He's painfully ill-suited for the spotlight, but he can't seem to shake his confused thirst for superstardom and the big royalty checks it is supposed to bring, which is probably part of the reason why The Last Kiss comes equipped with two versions of 'the Pharrell song,' ('Stress Ya'and 'Rockin With the Best') the first sounding like a bleepy retread of 'Can I Have It Like That?' and the second sporting the kind of lounge-R&B cheese Pharrell was peddling to Snoop in 2006 (think 'Let's Get Blown.') It's why DJ Khaled's screaming neon synthesizers strafe across a song called 'Grind Hard', which is saddled with perhaps the most limp, unmemorable hook Mary J.

To be fair, Jada is just as likely complicit the anonymous mess that is The Last Kiss as anyone.

Jadakiss kiss of death about