i don't know about bleek. once i seen him in the Garnier Fructis commercial rapping about shampoo, i really had no desire to check his stuff out.
LMAO can't even argue with that. Bleek is really nothing special imo but he's decent. I don't know his solo stuff at all really but just from his features on Jay's stuff you can tell he can ride a beat and is ok lyrically. He doesn't jump out as being a terrible rapper or anything, so its odd for Complex to be dumping on him.
Few nice examples of Bleek:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4FA01wE8LA <- Bleek over Premo (****'s actually hot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RC_z_zpims&feature=related <- Coming of Age, the classic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRKkOFdyl_c <- Is that Your Chick
As far as Jay goes, the classics are Reasonable Doubt, Blueprint, and Black Album. Those albums are killed thoroughly and won't disappoint.
After that if you want more you have to fish through the other albums for whats good and whats not. Vol 1-3 are the hardest to get into now imo, just because they seem the most dated production/content wise. Never skip his intros, they're often among the best tracks on the album.
Another thing that really helps is finding mixtapes and such that just put Jay verses over hot beats. This really helped me realize how good Vol 1-3 really were. I know a lot of people didn't realize just how sick Encore was until they heard the Linkin Park mash-up. This helps with any great rapper, though. I've found great mash-ups of Nas as well.
Here's a good example of a Jay verse probably originally overlooked -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC7I6Mz05NQ
I highly recommend that whole Noodles mixtape. Great mashups of Jay on there, including the verses on Hovi Baby from BP2 which I never could deal with because of that terrible hook. Turns out the verses are beast.