JAY-Z Page 10
Jay’s microphone went silent, symbolically, in 2003 after the release of The Black Album, one of the top three records of his career. In the three years of his retirement, the music, production, and lyrical aesthetics of hip hop shifted regions, altered themes, and, too often, dipped in artistic skills. 2006 saw artists like Chingy (“Pullin’ Me Back”), Young Dro (“Shoulder Lean”), Yung Joc (“It’s Goin’ Down”), T.I. (“What You Know”), and Dem Franchize Boyz (“Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It”) take center stage in hip hop. Between 2003 and 2006 the mainstream rap music industry took a turn toward trap musical production—which is bass heavy and features rapid-fire high hats, glowing in Southern drug dealer chic—and what some critics cynically refer to as “mumble rap,” a trend so dominant that it thrives in the present moment.
In this sense, Kingdom Come is a comeback album that plays as an extended superhero comic book analogy. Jay represents those traditional heroes who have receded in retirement only to see the culture that they spent their careers cultivating squandered in the hands of a new crop of rappers and heroes with a different set of artistic and moral standards. If we push this comparison further, we can understand the monumental significance of Jay’s collaboration with former N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) member and seminal producer Dr. Dre on this record. Dre produced “Lost One,” “30 Something,” “Trouble,” and “Minority Report.” A mere decade earlier such an extensive collaboration was unimaginable. (Although Jay had in 1999 supplied the words for Dre’s influential hit “Still D.R.E.”) And much like Jay, Dre was coming to terms with the changing paradigms of the culture. In Dre’s case it was musical production shifting away from the aesthetic conventions and musical vocabulary he was familiar with, especially the G-funk sound of throbbing bass, melodic synthesizers, live instrumentation, dense harmonies, and sprightly chord progressions that reigned on the West Coast during the “golden era” of hip hop from 1988 to 1998.
“Kingdom Come,” the title track, features a variety of iconic and superhero allusions, including Superman and Clark Kent, Spiderman and Peter Parker, Iceberg Slim, Underdog, and Flash Gordon.
Just when they thought it was all over
I put the whole world on my back and broad shoulders
The boy HOVA, who you know talk all over tracks like that?
Guess what New York, New York—we back!
Themes of retirement, heroics, and the savior’s return in “Kingdom Come” are emblematic of the moment. They resonate throughout the rest of the record, putting each track in the context of rap music’s paradigmatic shifts and the angst felt by aging hip hop impresarios as the reins of the culture seemed to be slipping from their grasp.
Kingdom Come is widely considered, even by the artist himself, to be JAY-Z’s weakest album. Jay and the critics couldn’t be more wrong. Kingdom Come is one of his most accomplished and mature albums—4:44’s prelude in some ways. Jay seriously considered releasing Kingdom Come under his “government name.” And maybe history will categorize this record and 4:44 as the Shawn Carter albums within JAY-Z’s full body of work. If Kingdom Come is his worst effort, then how do we account for the palpable pain expressed at losing his nephew Colleek in an automobile accident, and feeling partly responsible for his death, on “Lost One”?
My nephew died in the car I bought
So I’m under the belief it’s partly my fault
Close my eyes and squeeze, try to block that thought
Place any burden on me but please, not that, Lord
But time don’t go back, it goes forward
Can’t run from the pain, go towards it
Some things can’t be explained, what caused it?
Such a beautiful soul, so pure, shit!
How does one account for the dreamy existential reflections on destiny, his nephew in heaven, karma, and the consequences to his unborn daughters in “Beach Chair”:
Colleek, are you praying for me?
See I got demons in my past, so I got daughters on the way
If the prophecy’s correct, then the child should have to pay
For the sins of a father
So I barter my tomorrows against my yesterdays
In hope that she’ll be okay
What of his unsparing self-examination and advocacy for social justice on “Minority Report,” which I’ll explore at length in the next chapter? And “The Prelude” is likely the best opening of any hip hop album of that era, where Jay gets back at rival rappers, does an autopsy on the hip hop game, and announces that at thirty-seven, and coming out of retirement, he is still king of the hill:
Woo! Guess who’s back?
Since this is a New Era, got a fresh new hat
Ten year veteran, I’ve been set
I’ve been through with this bullshit game but I never can
I used to think rappin’ at 38 was ill
Well last year alone I grossed 38 mill’
I know I ain’t quite 38 but still
The flow so Special got a .38 feel
The real is back.
Kingdom Come is a decidedly adult album with mature themes. If hip hop is becoming “lil,” and “young,” Kingdom Come is all grown up. It does many of the things that make Jay a powerful poet and influential intellectual: it alludes to pop cultural moments and figures, reflects on aging, rampages through metaphors, tropes, and double entendres, fights the powers that be, addresses urban crises, beefs a bit, mourns loss in elegiac gestures, proclaims his greatness in eloquent verse, embraces his mother’s love, thinks out loud about fame’s costs, and probes the ethereal, transcendent nature of human identity and destiny.
The album was panned by critics, at least in part because Jay wasn’t exclusively, or primarily, rapping about hustling. (Maybe the critics skimmed through the hustler’s itinerary performed con brio as Jay’s narrator brags he “brought that crack back like a yo-yo” and lamented “all these rival dealers trying to do me in” on “Oh My God.”) That said, JAY-Z did follow Kingdom Come with American Gangster, considered a return to form by critics and his core fan base alike. It is a great record, but so is Kingdom Come. In fact, what Here, My Dear was to Marvin Gaye, Kingdom Come is to Jay: an underappreciated record that was far greater than its critical reception suggested at the time. But to match the naked self-revelation and brutal honesty that Gaye managed on Here, My Dear, Jay would have to dig deeper into his life and look deeper into his soul. Jay would soon discover, more than ever before, the wisdom of the feminist credo: the personal is political.
Black women have shouldered so much of the weight and the responsibility for the challenges that Black folks face in relationships. And we have endured 40 years of angry Black men in hip hop telling us that it is all our fault. JAY-Z provides an important corrective to this narrative, and he opens the door for a different kind of cultural conversation … Hip hop owes it to Black men to allow them to be more complex and complicated characters than the caricatures of toughness and insensitivity that they often become in popular culture.
BRITTNEY COOPER
Dualities exist in JAY-Z’s career-wide embrace of crass consumerism and his critique of how elite establishment powers that be keep their foot on the neck of the underclass. The complexity of this duality is at the core of his political philosophy. In that, JAY-Z is transcending the status quo.
BAKARI KITWANA
3
“Somewhere in America”
POLITICS
While it is true that JAY-Z has matured politically over the years, his obsession with hustling and his unabashed capitalist aspirations may have blunted our appreciation for how “woke” he’s been from the start. Hustling, as we have seen, not only has moral consequences, but it has myriad social and political meanings as well. JAY-Z has been an eagle-eyed social critic who has commented in his lyrics on pressing issues, and there is a lot he has taken stock of. The misuse of psychotherapy and the overmedication of black youth. The politics of black masculinity and the politics of black love. Ra
cial injustice and the impact of slavery on contemporary culture. European misadventures in colonialism and American myths of patriotism and empire. Police brutality and 9/11 and its relation to black folk.
JAY-Z has also addressed the racial context of natural disasters and their exposure of political hypocrisy. He has taken on criminal justice reform. And he has offered invaluable criticism of civil rights icons, allowing us to grapple with the moral contradictions of black elites in entertainment and leadership. He has proved along the way that hip hop is a way to say the words that matter the most to our moral advance. As is the case with many Negro spirituals, political meaning is often hidden in the lyrics, crammed between the lines, or tucked away in songs that are lesser hits so that their meaning takes, well, fewer hits—lest those surveilling the content identify its liberating or subversive intent. That may mean that some quarters of conservative or respectable black America overlook or ignore those messages too. Jay evokes this double meaning skillfully. “It’s like a old negro spiritual, but I mastered Toby,” he says on “Some People Hate,” referring to the character in the book and TV series Roots who is stolen from Africa with the name Kunta Kinte but given the name Toby when enslaved in America.
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A major reason looms for misinterpreting JAY-Z’s political pedigree: his highly visible role in a dramatic period of American history has obscured his prior political engagement. Barack Obama and JAY-Z had effortless simpatico and irresistible appeal as giants who saw pieces of themselves in each other. The Obama connection was sexy and tailor-made for the papers and the digital sphere that took a shine to their productive partnership.
Obama was a wunderkind who seemed to emerge fully formed, like Athena out of some political Zeus’s head, in 2004 to join the United States Senate, only to ascend to the presidency a mere four years later. Before his rise he was a local politician who labored in relative obscurity as an Illinois state representative. If we compare him to JAY-Z, Obama’s time in the state legislature was like the time Jay spent hustling in the streets while searching for a record deal. Obama’s failure in a 2000 election to unseat former Black Panther Bobby Rush as a congressman is comparable to Jay getting turned down time and again by music executives before he founded his own label and released his first album in 1996.
The similarities don’t end there. Obama and Jay are both tall, talented, and tremendously charismatic men who used words to forge their paths in the world. Both are the definition of black cool. Levelheaded Afropolitans, they exhibit black grace under white pressure, pivoting in the black world and navigating through the white one, their complicated identities remaining intact. Obama, of course, absorbed and reproduced a bivalent racial identity, filtering his whiteness through his black eyes, discovering the meaning of his blackness in the presence of whiter bodies. Jay’s blackness was equally bisected, though his experience of race intersected not with color but with class. The black poor may as well have been foreigners, so wide was the gulf between Marcy and the upper reaches of black Manhattan. Both Obama and Jay endured troubled paternity. Their black fathers made indecent and soul-shearing exits, briefly returning, only to be gone for good. It seems that JAY-Z forgave his father in a way that Obama could not. Perhaps that is because Jay got the sort of closure never afforded Obama. After all, Obama last saw his father when he was an unformed boy of ten (even though his father didn’t die until Obama was twenty-one), which is far different than seeing your father for the final time at thirty-three, when you’ve ascended to superstardom, as Jay did. However, previous to that, JAY-Z hadn’t seen his father since he was eleven, and his father died shortly after they reconnected.
Obama and Jay are both married to strong and brilliant women whose popularity outstrips their own. Obama said as he offered tribute to Jay by video for the Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony in 2017 that he had been listening to the rapper since he was a “young and hungry state senator.” He sampled Jay during his 2008 presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton when he symbolically brushed the dirt off his shoulders, signifying that her attacks on him were easily discarded, mimicking a move made in the video for JAY-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.” He tweeted a reference to Jay’s “My 1st Song” from his Black Album (a song stressing that one should treat one’s last song like one’s first, one’s first like one’s last, staying hungry and putting one’s heart into the effort) while adding the finishing touches on his last State of the Union Address. Jay’s words on his supposed swan song before retirement in 2003 inspired Obama as he faced the end of his office.
It’s my life—it’s my pain and my struggle
The song that I sing to you it’s my ev-ery-thing
Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first
And my thirst is the same as when I came
It’s my joy and my tears and the laughter it brings to me
It’s my ev-ery-thing.
Obama bragged in his tribute, “I’m pretty sure I’m still the only president to listen to JAY-Z’s music in the Oval Office.”
Jay was equally taken by Obama, campaigning for him during both presidential runs, often joined by Beyoncé, and raising big money. (Obama tweeted a photo of a smiling trio—him, Jay, and Beyoncé—a month before his 2012 reelection, with the caption, “A couple supporters in a New York State of mind last night.”) Jay made campaign ads for Obama, and, of course, he joined Young Jeezy and Nas on the remix to “My President Is Black,” and, in a live performance of the song in Washington, D.C., on the eve of Obama’s inauguration, he humorously suggested that racists might even find some relief in Obama’s white heritage.
My president is black
In fact he’s half white
So even in a racist mind
He’s half right
If you have a racist mind
You be aight.
Jay also tweaked an anonymous poem that was widely circulated on the Internet in 2008. The poem was based on a February 2008 speech by former Louisiana congressman Cleo Fields, who said that “W.E.B. DuBois taught so that Rosa Parks could take a seat. Rosa took a seat so we all could take a stand. We all took a stand so that Martin Luther King, Jr., could march. Martin marched so Jesse Jackson could run. Jesse ran so Obama could WIN.” Scholar DuBois and civil rights leader Jackson, two of our most important icons, were removed in the popular online poem. Jay rapped that “Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk / Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run,” which Obama in turn paraphrased in his 2015 speech at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Selma march. “We honored those who walked so we could run. We must run so our children soar.”
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Many mistakenly believe that JAY-Z’s first extensive foray into establishment politics was the only time he talked about issues he cared for. Beyond his support of Obama, Jay has also mastered a sneak-and-speak approach to political commentary. He laces his lyrics with pieces of social and political insight, from entire blocs of songs, to extended metaphors, to just a word or two. On “Made in America,” Jay claims, “The scales was lopsided, I’m just restoring order,” speaking both of weighing cocaine and fighting gross injustice and restoring balance between black and white.
On the 2010 song “Shiny Suit Theory,” made by rapper Jay Electronica, who is signed to Jay’s Roc Nation record label, JAY-Z guest starred and flipped the tables on the therapeutic profession: instead of culturally incompetent shrinks treating black children, Jay puts psychiatry itself on the couch and gives it a rousing psychoanalytic read. Jay’s narrator sets the scene with a therapist receiving a report about Jay that concludes he is delusional for believing that he, a boy from the hood, could share a cover with Warren Buffett, as Jay did on Forbes magazine in 2010.
In this manila envelope, the results of my insanity
Quack said I crossed the line ’tween real life and fantasy.
Jay wasn’t just giving psychiatry the bum’s rush. He was also implicitly challenging the logic undergirding the Am
erican perversion of the Geisteswissenschaften, as thinkers use philosophy, history, literary and cultural studies, and theology to justify the argument that black folk are intellectually inferior, raving barbarians, or just crazy. Clearly the psychiatrist represents white America and its attempts to convince black folk that we are loony for wanting to make it in America. Jay offers bracing bars that nod to Rosa Parks and the divine redemption—better yet, the divine conception—of hustling.
In the world of no justice and black ladies on the back of buses
I’m the immaculate conception of rappers-slash-hustlers
My God, it’s so hard to conceive
But it all falls perfect, I’m like autumn is to trees.
The therapist “scribbled a prescription for some Prozac, he said, ‘Take that for your mustard,’” since “you gotta be psychotic or mixing something potent with your vodka / It takes a lot to shock us but you being so prosperous is preposterous.”
Wealth isn’t just the aspirational goal of the desperately poor, but speaks to a will to overcome, to resist, to rise from the back of the bus to hobnob with billionaires, to even believe that one might become a billionaire oneself someday. It is to combat racist forces that Jay asks how a “nappy headed boy from out the projects / Be the apple of America’s obsession?” Jay’s narrator doesn’t just fight back; he reverses the terms, underscores the racist rationalizations that deny black sanity and genius, and addresses the plague of overmedicating black kids. Certainly, overmedicating children is a national concern as we address the side effects of drugs that accompany the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions. But the racial fallout is heightened when black kids, who are already victims of an unjust, resource-starved, two-tiered educational system, are subject to medical intervention apart from careful, compassionate, culturally aware talk therapy.