JAY-Z Read online

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  To

  Robert Frederick Smith

  BUSINESSMAN, INVESTOR, AND PHILANTHROPIST

  A righteous black man who embodies the best of our people and a noble tradition of using wealth to preserve black culture and to help the next generation by paying off the student loan debt of nearly 400 Morehouse College graduates

  and

  Michael G. Rubin

  BUSINESSMAN AND PARTNER OF THE PHILADELPHIA 76ERS

  An upright man who embodies the spirit of true democracy in the quest to reform a criminal justice system that is fundamentally unfair to millions of black folk across the land

  It is an American cultural phenomenon, and as such, it’s more than any of the definitions or connotations that I have mentioned. It’s really a concept. And it’s interesting to me as a writer because it’s so full of contradictions. It’s American, indisputably American, and ethnically marginal. It’s black and free. It’s intricate and wild. It’s spontaneous and practiced. It’s exaggerated and simple. It’s constantly invented, always brand-new, but somehow familiar and known.

  TONI MORRISON

  JAY-Z portrays himself as an entrepreneur whose beginnings as a street corner crack dealer are the stuff of Horatio Alger, no less part of the mythical American Dream than corporate robber barons or big city crime bosses.

  MILES WHITE

  FOREWORD

  By Pharrell

  I was honored when Michael Eric Dyson asked me to pen this foreword to his reflections on the incredible impact my dear friend and longtime collaborator JAY-Z has had on the world. Over the last quarter century, Jay has established himself as one of the most gifted artists of any genre to ever speak into a microphone. I use the idea of synesthesia to describe my approach to producing, and it’s especially true when I’m working with Jay. It’s the process of creating one form of sensory impression by cultivating another form of sensory impression. Art is at its best when you hear a lyric and it brings an image to mind, or when you view a painting and it makes you hear a sound. As an artist, JAY-Z really gets this simple aesthetic fact. He really does “paint pictures with poems.” I am always challenged as a producer to think with my eyes, ears, and emotions when I work with Jay.

  I sincerely believe that JAY-Z is a philosopher and a poet. I have likened him to the Oracle at Delphi because of his unique ability to be a prophet, seer, and mystic at the same time. These artistic attributes translate into a godlike mythology, and that vibe is captured in one of the names Jay’s been given, Hova, short for JAYHOVA, a play on Jehovah. For me, it doesn’t really matter who is the greatest of all MCs. That debate is arbitrary and ultimately depends on the point of view of the person arguing about the G.O.A.T. But, besides his artistic genius, there are things about Jay’s career that nobody can debate. How many albums he’s released, how many records he’s sold, the number of hit singles he’s had, the number of seats he’s sold in a venue, and the number of zeroes attached to his massive material wealth. These are facts. Indeed, as Jay likes to say, they’re super facts. But Jay’s greatness lies beyond even the metrics of rhyme skills and material success. The numbers I’ve cited only matter because they represent the countless masses that greatly love and appreciate Jay’s gifts. Working with him up close, I can say there is truly no one like him, and that he takes his art and craftsmanship with the utmost seriousness.

  In fact, I don’t mind mumble rap as much as many of its critics, mostly because I’ve been a witness to Jay’s enigmatic and utterly astonishing writing and recording process. In studio, Jay often mumbles his way through tracks as a preparation tactic for the actual recording of his lyrics. During the mumble-rap phase of Jay’s recording sessions, the lyrics to the song are indecipherable. It’s a code to which only he has the key. Those of us who admire his craft can only gain access to their meaning after he blesses the microphone with the lyrical magic hidden in those well-rehearsed, yet incomprehensible, mumbles. It’s a mysterious process. Even though he mumbles, Jay knows what those verses will be. It is, in effect, a lyrical exercise—a process through which he familiarizes himself with the production so that his flow will seamlessly interact with each aspect of the beat. His unmistakable flow is born in these moments, and I consider it a privilege as a producer to have been able to see quite a bit of it. JAY-Z’s unparalleled writing and recording processes shed tremendous light on contemporary popular styles of an art form that he revolutionized. That is just one more example of his huge impact and his culture-defining significance.

  In 2019, Jay joined me onstage for a surprise performance of several of our most popular collaborations at the “Something in the Water” music festival. I am grateful for his friendship and for every opportunity to work with him. But this performance will always have a special place in my heart and mind. “Something in the Water” is just one way that I am trying to give back to my community; it is one of the ways that I honor where I’m from, and for Jay to endorse that and support me means the world to me. But this particular performance happened in the midst of one of my home state’s most tumultuous political and social periods. Still reeling from the tragedy of Charlottesville, we were faced with political crises that still remain unresolved. A month after my event, on May 31, 2019, the city of Virginia Beach experienced one of its most deadly mass shootings when an armed man entered one of our municipal buildings with the intent to murder as many innocent Virginians as possible—leaving twelve dead and many more injured. The psychological trauma is incalculable. In times like this we have to rally our communities to social justice. I have been engaged in these efforts for some time now. And I must say that Shawn “JAY-Z” Carter has been an exceptional inspiration for me in this area, just as he has been a role model for me in the music business.

  For me, and I hope for you as well, JAY-Z: Made in America is a profound reckoning with the extraordinary musical, social, and political contributions of one of the world’s greatest artists, written by one of the world’s greatest public intellectuals. Dyson not only takes measure of Jay’s unprecedented artistic achievements, but he uses Jay’s life, lyrics, loves, and losses—and of course his spectacular triumphs—to say some important things about us as a people and a country. It is the book that hip hop and the nation need, penned by the man who can best understand what our contributions to the world mean. Even if we know all of the lyrics to all of the songs, and even if we have watched all of the videos and read all of the articles and reviews, Dyson’s amazing book shows us that we still have a lot to learn about ourselves and the world we live in from the brilliant yet improbable career of a street hustler who has become a global icon.

  Each moniker that JAY-Z references serves distinct purposes related to his ability to exhibit social capital and remain fluid in the various publics in which he has influence, be it the upper echelons of the recording industry, the mainstream pop charts, Madison Avenue taste makers, or of course the “hood.” … [T]he moniker JAY-Z is the quintess
ential hip-hop commodity that is at the root of the rapper’s social fluidity.

  MARK ANTHONY NEAL

  My work is infused with [hip hop]. Actually, deeper than that, my work is grounded in it … I mean to say, hopefully more clearly, that if I consider my adulthood to be the time when I really began to try to think about stuff, and when I really began to think about how to think about stuff, then hip-hop is the music that was on when I embarked upon that thinking.

  FRED MOTEN

  INTRODUCTION

  “Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself”

  In the late fall of 2011, the Today Show came to Georgetown to do a story on my course on the rapper JAY-Z. The course had garnered quite a bit of national press, and correspondent Craig Melvin (on his first assignment, now one of the show’s hosts) had been tasked to explore what we did in class. We discussed why a figure like JAY-Z belonged in a college curriculum, why some parents of the students were skeptical, and why it was important to parse JAY-Z’s lyrics as poetry. Most of the media coverage of the class was positive, but there was also predictable pushback. Conservatives contended that the class was cover for my leftist views, while educational purists wondered about the value of such a course because it didn’t fit into the traditional curriculum.

  I was a grizzled veteran of such discussions since by that time I’d been teaching hip hop at the university level for fifteen years. I didn’t romanticize hip hop, didn’t make it a fetish of class identity or an avatar of authentic blackness. Rather, I approached the genre as a fascinating artistic and cultural expression that had a great deal to teach us about America and race and class and gender too. By now this must seem like old hat because surely there are hundreds of hip hop classes around the nation in colleges, and high schools too.

  But that doesn’t mean that most folks in our society are convinced that it is a good thing to study hip hop in the academy. The troubling resurgence of racism in American culture means that hip hop is in the spotlight again. Judging by the hate mail I get for grappling with race in my courses on JAY-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé, it is clear that discussions of hip hop are as compelling as ever. In response to this critical moment, artists like T.I., Meek Mill, and Cardi B use their considerable clout and prominent platforms to speak up about social injustice.

  Teaching JAY-Z is especially satisfying for me. I have taught courses on the murdered actor and rap icon Tupac Shakur at several colleges and universities. I have enthusiastically covered the history of hip hop culture and music in detail in other courses. But teaching JAY-Z time and again through the years has been even more rewarding. It always involves a great degree of study with students about a range of issues and ideas, from class to gender, race to politics, public housing projects to blackness. JAY-Z provokes reflection on big social and moral concerns. And, of course, artistic ones too, although it becomes apparent the more I study him that he is no average bear, that he is, quite simply, a rhetorical genius whose wordplay and literary skill are nonpareil.

  The more I pore over his lyrics, the more I realize that I am dealing with an extremely intelligent poet whose work matches the poets I’ve admired since childhood. My pastor at church used to trade lines of poetry with me from Tennyson and Hughes, Brooks and Yeats. I developed an appreciation for the epic sweep of culture that could be condensed into the poetic arts. JAY-Z is capable of doing the same; he can describe street hustling with an artistic verve that is every bit as beautiful and poignant as that of the best canon poets. His rolling or clipped cadences, his dense or simple descriptions, his slow or sped-up observations about life unfurl like a thickly knitted quilt cast over shivering bones.

  I am impressed with how effortless JAY-Z makes it all seem. I have grown to appreciate just how much work goes into finding the right word, fitting in the right phrase, or making just the right allusion. He uses these skills to say that the rap game is in trouble, that racism is a persistent ill, and, most memorably, that no other rapper has enjoyed comparable longevity at the top.

  There’s never been a nigga this good for this long

  This hood or this pop, this hot or this strong

  With so many different flows, this one’s for this song

  The next one I switch up, this one will get bit up.

  His verse is wildly eclectic. He can in one instant flaunt his own poetic virtue and the next instant portray the bitter contradictions of zealous belief.

  I’m from the place where the church is the flakiest

  And niggas been praying to God so long that they atheist.

  As I’ve studied and taught, I’ve learned of Jay’s great sense of humor, his sense of irony, his love for his craft. I learned how he uses words to make us feel the crushing heartbreak of a broken home.

  Now, all the teachers couldn’t reach me

  And my momma couldn’t beat me

  Hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seein’ me.

  As I listened to JAY-Z I knew I needed to write a book about the major themes of his art, how he put his words together, and why they make sense the way they do. Jay’s prodigious memory and his enormous cool made him that much more appealing. He is one of the few hip hop artists I’ve seen in concert who can bridge the aesthetic gulf between the studio and the stage. The intimacies and implications of a hip hop song are usually best heard in your headphones. It is far more difficult to catch a song’s meaning when it’s blurted out by a rapper onstage seeking to match the timing and tone of the sound booth.

  I knew that to write about Jay meant to write about the themes he is taken with, to probe his verbal gifts, and to grapple with his growing political consciousness. His politics are sometimes subtle; sometimes just a phrase or a bar communicate so much meaning.

  I arrived on the day Fred Hampton died

  Uh, real niggas just multiply.

  In the brief scope of this couplet Jay does a couple of important things. He identifies with a fallen member of the sixties-era Black Panther Party who was unjustly murdered by the Chicago police and the FBI. He also suggests that Hampton’s spirit animated the birth of a revolutionary cultural figure like Jay himself.

  It should be clear that JAY-Z is America at its scrappy, brash, irreverent, soulful, ingenious best. He is as transcendent a cultural icon as Frank Sinatra, as adventurous a self-made billionaire as Mark Zuckerberg, as gifted a poet as Walt Whitman. When we see JAY-Z, we glimpse the powerful silhouette of American ambition sketched against the canopy of national striving. When we hear JAY-Z, we listen to the incomparable tongue of American democracy expressed by a people too long held underfoot. What JAY-Z thinks and believes, what he does and says, is the quintessential expression of who we are as a people and a nation.

  * * *

  The half-century mark for JAY-Z is here. He has become the genre’s first billionaire. He reigns as an elder statesman in a field brimming with artists half his age. He continues to produce relevant rap records that make the charts. And he is charting an artistic and political response to revived racism and renewed hostility to blackness. Jay has logged thirty years as a recording artist. His ideas, and the issues he addresses, offer us plenty to consider. Masculinity and black love. Hustling and elections. Gentrification and generational wealth. Criminal justice reform and neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. Visual art and the unbearable whiteness of museum walls. Racial injustice and the impact of slavery. The virtues of psychotherapy and its racial misuse. American myths of patriotism and empire. Police brutality and the overmedication of black youth. And lots more besides.

  The induction of JAY-Z as the first hip hop artist in the Songwriters Hall of Fame encourages us to explore his poetic gifts—his use of braggadocio and allusion, signifying and double entendre, metaphor and homophones, contronyms and metonyms. That signal honor and his towering stature also invite us to weigh his impact on hip hop and to consider what his brotherhood with immortal MC The Notorious B.I.G., his beef with rap legend Nas, and his complicated relationship with rap superstar Drake te
ach us about ourselves and about hip hop’s reach and limits. Since this is JAY-Z’s America, it is important to trace his influence on younger figures like basketball icon LeBron James and fallen rapper Nipsey Hussle, each of whom reflects elements of Jay’s vision of hustling. It is instructive how even a few words from Jay bid us to reinterpret leaders like Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King, Jr., and to scrutinize geniuses become scoundrels like singer R. Kelly and comedian Bill Cosby.

  This seems an ideal time to grapple with JAY-Z’s lyrics and legacy, examine his ideas and imagination, assess his impact and importance. In 2003, Jay rapped, “Allow me to re-introduce myself,” in his song “Public Service Announcement.” Permit me to introduce his work and thinking to those who may not know him well. And allow me to re-introduce him to those who know him but haven’t studied his art and evolution closely.

  In 2012, JAY-Z founded the Made in America Festival, an annual two-day musical event held in Philadelphia over the Labor Day weekend. As curator of the festival, JAY-Z brings together acts from a broad array of musical genres, including hip hop, pop, R&B, Latin, EDM (electronic dance music), and indie, experimental, and alternative rock. “Through all the lines and things that are put in place to divide each other, all like-minded people gather together,” Jay said on the promotional video for the inaugural festival. “We’re more curious than ever. We create music to express ourselves … We’re all trading off each other’s culture. So no matter what lines you put … we’re all somehow gonna find a way to come together ’cause the lines and the titles can never keep us apart. This is what we’ve been. To put that on display for the world is … just being honest. That’s it, that’s what it’s all about. We are finally living out our creed.”