When the soundtrack to Empire entered the US charts at No 1 in March, no one could have been particularly surprised, with one possible exception: Madonna, who unexpectedly found herself debuting at No 2. All that effort promoting your new album – the interviews, the online courting of controversy, unceremoniously falling on your arse at the Brits – and you’re pipped at the post by one of the oldest tricks in the book, the one that Micky Dolenz of the Monkees famously described as “the equivalent of Leonard Nimoy really becoming a Vulcan”. It’s almost 60 years since Ricky Nelson performed Fats Domino’s I’m Walkin’ on his parents’ sitcom and ended up a real-life pop star, but launching a musical career by pretending to have a musical career on a TV show still seems to work like a dream. It’s not just that the soundtrack album of Empire – a soapy musical drama about a feuding family and their urban entertainment company that’s swiftly become one of the biggest TV shows in the US – was successful: two members of the cast now have major-label deals in their own right. Leonard Nimoy has really become a Vulcan once more.
The big difference between Empire and its televisual forebears may be how much emphasis it has placed on the music. Its creators appointed Timbaland, a producer and songwriter who at the last count had come up with something like 100 US hit singles, to oversee the music. Like the men behind the Monkees, who solicited contributions for their imaginary band’s oeuvre from the cream of the Brill Building writers, they clearly weren’t just after authenticity: they were after hits. And they got them – although, listening to the Empire soundtrack, you do occasionally wonder if that was more to do with the sheer amount of exposure the music got on telly than its actual quality.
One thing that elevates Empire from just being the hip-hop version of Dynasty – Blingasty, if you will – is that, however preposterous the plot gets, at least some of the characters seem to have been drawn with one eye on actual events in the world of hip-hop and R&B. There’s an obvious echo of Frank Ocean in Jamal Lyon, a gay singer-songwriter attempting to be open about his sexuality in a musical community famed for its homophobia. Meanwhile, Jamal’s shiftless, fame-obsessed rapper brother, Hakeem, has been taken by some as a wry comment on the poppier end of the hip-hop spectrum: he does rather seem the type who’d jump on a ghastly, EDM-influenced “collab” with Pitbull, or indeed into bed with a minor Kardashian, if he thought it would get him in the gossip mags. It’s hard to work out if the soundtrack album’s low points, almost all of which involve Hakeem, are intended in the same way.
One is a rap version of Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing, which you can save yourself a load of misery by not actually listening to, but simply envisaging it instead. It sounds exactly as you’d imagine a pop-rap cover of Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing to sound, ie appalling. Is it meant as caricature of the dumbo hooks and hollow lyrics of the most craven pop-rap hits? The sly middle eight – “commercialise, advertise, look mom I’m on TV” – suggests so, but believing it’s been made with its tongue in cheek doesn’t make it any more enjoyable an experience to listen to; tasked with making the track believable, the authors haven’t turned up the satire enough to make it mitigatingly funny. Meanwhile, if the perkily grating You’re So Beautiful was supposed to be a satire, it doesn’t seem to have been taken that way. It became a huge hit in the US, despite offering up what may be one of the worst compliments ever handed out to a plus-sized lady in music history: “You look like a bag of money.” Perhaps it is telling that those two songs feature on the 18-track deluxe edition of the album that you can hear on Spotify, but not on the 11-track CD that Columbia is releasing in the UK.
You could say that the actor playing Hakeem – who, off screen, is an aspiring hip-hop artist called Yazz the Greatest – has got a bit of rough deal here, lumbered as he is with performing what appear to be a load of knowing takes on rotten music. Alas, even when he’s given something less questionable in its intent – Power of the Empire, which musically approximates the epic piano-and-strings sweep of Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind – he’s revealed as a passable rather than fantastic rapper; still, that hasn’t stopped Columbia signing him up as a solo artist. That aside, the Empire soundtrack gets stronger when it shifts away from hip-hop. The R&B tracks Timbaland and his team have come up with feel more convincing as standalone songs, divorced from the plotline. The producer wouldn’t have been embarrassed to offer Good Enough or What Is Love? to one of his high-profile IRL clients, which isn’t something you could say about everything he’s co-written here. It’s a state of affairs abetted by the fact that Jussie Smollett, who plays Jamal, is an authentically great singer: blessed with a dramatic falsetto, he is able to handle the slow-burning misery of Good Enough and the defiant sneer of Keep Your Money, and holds his own next to special guests including Estelle and Jennifer Hudson.
That is more than can be said for his onscreen father, actor Terrence Howard, who has to duet with Mary J Blige on Shake Down. The poor guy sounds like he’s killing himself trying and failing to keep up with a singer who is barely breaking a sweat. Conversely, what should be the most uncomfortable guest spot turns out to be the most startling. The idea of Courtney Love singing a ballad with a group of gospel singers seems faintly terrifying: you think about it and then find yourself wondering if you’ll ever be able to unclench your buttocks without surgical intervention. The reality is brilliant, partly because Walk Out on Me is a great song, pitched somewhere between Lana del Rey and the hysterical melodrama of a 3am-drunk-dialling power ballad in the vein of Heart’s Alone. But it’s not just a matter of good material: Love’s voice fits the careworn lyrics, effortlessly summoning the kind of ravaged darkness that Lana del Rey nearly ruptures herself trying to conjure up.
It’s one of a handful of high points on an album that’s not as great as the show’s success suggests. Perhaps there’ll be more next season. You get the feeling that Timbaland and his team might have been conserving their energies here, unwilling to risk their best stuff on a TV show that might not have been a hit; why squander something you can give to a real pop star on an imaginary one? That’s not a question they’ll have to ask themselves next time around.
