Young Jeezy

The Recession (Def Jam)

Ne-Yo

Year of the Gentleman (Def Jam)

If you plotted the commercial fortunes of African-American pop for the past 20 years, you'd end up with a handy forward curve predicting the movements of the Dow Jones industrial average-ticking into the stratosphere by the first part of this decade, and then crashing as the euphoria wears off and common sense sets in. If, like me, you figure that's no more preposterous a basis for investment decisions than the models the so-called experts use, bear this in mind: judging by the dire quality of this year's rap and R & B releases, we've got a long way to go before the market hits bottom.

A pair of recent albums by a rapper (Young Jeezy) and a crooner (Ne-Yo) suggest the news is slightly better for the shareholders of Def Jam Recordings. Jeezy, a reformed crack dealer who verbalizes in a kind of canyon-filling slur, presciently called his third disc The Recession—but anyone seeking a nuanced parsing of capitalism's shortcomings should look elsewhere. Instead, Jeezy provides a lesson in motivational nihilism, offering songs that work best as the soundtrack to a particularly American spectacle: the nightly introduction of the home team at NBA games, when players exchange complicated handshakes and huddle together under a spotlight, the routine painfully contrived and basically meaningless but thrilling all the same.

Ne-Yo is the Randy Newman of R & B, a gifted songwriter operating at the human scale, breathing a much-needed dose of observational detail and real-life feeling into his glossy tunes. While its production and arrangements—mostly courtesy of Norwegian hit makers Stargate—are consistently airless, Year of the Gentleman wins on the strength of Ne-Yo's melodies, which act as handsome vehicles for some genuine reflections on the timeworn themes of romantic devotion and betrayal. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about Ne-Yo's style, but in his fine songcraft and his sober portrayal of relationship entanglements, he seems, today, almost revolutionary.