JAY-Z Page 11

  Sometimes the delusions and rationalizations of race come from within blackness itself. The animated video for 2017’s “Story of O.J.,” directed by Mark Romanek and JAY-Z, features the character “Jaybo,” a portmanteau of JAY-Z and Sambo and a withering visual and lyrical signification on JAY-Z himself. Casting himself, even in animated form, as a derogatory Sambo-like figure is a feat that Jay is able to pull off because he has spent a long career artistically reflecting on race. The life of JAY-Z glimpsed in song highlights the struggle and occasional conflict between his sense of once being black and poor and now being black and wealthy. If we argue that race is socially constructed, rather than built on genetics or biology, and that it is the broader social world that gives race meaning, then we might say that Jay’s vision of blackness is lyrically constructed.

  Back in 2003, when Jay was “Young, Gifted and Black,” he likened himself to Public Enemy front man Chuck D “standin’ in the crosshairs.” His crafty allusion to the PE logo is less about identifying with one of hip hop’s most aggressively pro-black groups and more about underscoring how it felt to be black and vulnerable, forever caught in the crosshairs of the scope of an American gun. Racism is unfailingly aimed at young black folk, their dreams, their families, and their communities. As “Young, Gifted and Black” unfolds, Jay recounts the pain and the loss of living in the postindustrial malaise of inner-city America. Later in the song he returns to a familiar theme, namely, that he will not “shed a tear” for his losses, signaling the dehumanizing effects of concentrated poverty and the violence it begets.

  If we fast forward from there to his 2006 duet with Nas, “Black Republican,” a different take on blackness looms. Given the current state of race on the right, it is difficult to reconcile the lyrics of this catchy collaboration with the Grand Old Party as it stands now. Of course, in light of the Trumpian seizure of the moral assets of Republican ideology, it is rather easy to concede, in retrospect, that in brute comparative terms, the GOP may have stood for something qualitatively different than what they presently proclaim. It is not that the 2006 version of Republicanism flashed much empathy for black folk. After all, as we shall shortly see, Jay, among many others, assailed George W. Bush for his heartless abandonment of the black poor during Katrina. But at least the right paid lip service to a “compassionate conservatism” that is all but silenced in our present moment.

  On the song, Jay and Nas claim to feel like black Republicans. The affect here is specific. For these two, after their epic battle, feeling like a black Republican is about making money—drug money or rap money, it doesn’t matter. But the catch, and the sure signpost of their faithful blackness, is that they look back and give back to the hood. They “can’t turn [their] back[s] on the hood / [we] got too much love for them.” The hook is about giving back, giving black. Jay’s verse on “Black Republican” is an urban hood tale about comrades in the rap and drug game who fall out and possibly reconcile as they realize all that is at stake. Of course, neither one is a Republican. The “Black Republican” title is simply a signifier for their desire to complicate conceptualizations of blackness itself.

  Jaybo spends much of the video for “The Story of O.J.,” arguably JAY-Z’s best entry in his considerable body of audiovisual art, strolling the streets of New York City and, eventually, the world. “The Story of O.J.” isn’t a story about O.J. Simpson. The song uses an anecdote about O.J. distancing himself from his blackness as an occasion to advise and mentor Jay’s audience about race, capitalism, and entrepreneurship. The visuals for “The Story of O.J.” video, drawn in a black-and-white, faux early-twentieth-century minstrel aesthetic, present a litany of stereotypical images—blackface performances, minstrel dances, plantation workers, cotton fields, lynch mobs, and a factory that produces members of the Ku Klux Klan. In aggregate, and without paying attention to the words of the song, the images of “The Story of O.J.” are patently offensive, especially to black folk. It is a lyrical wonder that JAY-Z’s words, and the canny, wry expressions of the animated Jaybo, change the meanings of these images. The words of “The Story of O.J.” reshape those images to deconstruct the history of racism.

  But antiblackness isn’t the only force that needs to be disassembled. The politics of black masculinity have to be laid bare as well, and Jay became a lightning rod for those offenses.

  * * *

  When Everything Is Love, by JAY-Z and Beyoncé (the Carters), appeared in June 2018 out of nowhere, by now their standard method of releasing new work, much of the world stopped for a moment. That pause was a collective holding of breath and a subsequent sigh of relief. The trilogy was complete. Fans of Beyoncé and her husband had no idea when Lemonade dropped in 2016 and changed the world that it was the opening salvo in arguably the greatest record-cycle trilogy ever produced in black music history. This had been perhaps the most thrilling appearance of Hegel in black culture since Martin Luther King’s famous remix in the sixties of the nineteenth-century German philosopher’s notions of a thesis, or statement of a position, its counterargument in an antithesis, and a final synthesis of the two.

  First, there was on April 23, 2016, the thesis, Lemonade. This was Beyoncé’s Arthur Janov–like primal scream of a record-as-therapy-session that unleashed mammoth waves of anger and grief, rocking the emotional ships of men the world over. It put us on notice that she, and by extension all women, would no longer tolerate the treacherous squandering of love, loyalty, faithfulness, and commitment. One of the most beautiful and powerful and adored women in the world commanded her artistic platform to amplify subversive melodies and defiant harmonies. And the culprit and cause of her pain was widely rumored to be her husband. He, like her, to keep the Hegelian theme going, was a world historical entertainment figure.

  It felt voyeuristic to see any of this, like we had happened upon a heated quarrel about personal goings-on we had all gossiped about but had no confirmation for nor any business knowing. It felt uncomfortable to hold this knowledge. It felt obscene to see her suffering, and really, to see the suffering of millions of women the world over. It felt at once thrilling and tragic to witness these women take vicarious swings of the bat with Beyoncé as she smashed a car windshield in the longform video of the album.

  This was unprecedented in black life. Sure, we see the carnage of black domestic disputes played out on “real housewives” franchises daily. But we cannot be certain that the presence of the television cameras hasn’t overly filtered the reality through the prism of entertainment and the lens of racial reflex, of cultural expectation. This was for the cameras too, but it was far higher art. Yes, this was entertainment too, but ironically, in its bold artifice, in its constructed, deliberate aesthetic, in its carefully selected words and images, it was far more honest and revealing than any reality show. We hadn’t seen this before, where the female member of a famous black couple told the truth about what it was that made their “us” a tenuous union.

  It was as if Coretta Scott King had sat down to write “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” except, in this case, it wasn’t the white man’s cage in which she found herself imprisoned. Instead it was her home, her heart, her head, her life, and what her life had turned into since loving and giving herself to the most remarkable man possible. But he had another side that she had dared not expose to the white world for fear they would use it against him to impugn his integrity and defeat his, and her, purpose. However, Lemonade is a different time. These are different circumstances. Jay and Bey aren’t civil rights leaders, though they are justice warriors. There are different rules. Respectability politics aren’t what they used to be, and the white world has been forced to make minor concessions to its hypocrisy of berating black folk for doing the same things that white folk do routinely.

  And the power dynamic is totally different. The fracas is public and the stakes are high. Lemonade threatened to become the greatest diss in music history. It is not a diss single, but several songs’ worth of venom directed at the category
man, not at any man in particular, at least not by name, so that its bitter genius is to signify without surrendering to a demand to be explicit. Interestingly enough, that is a demand made famous by the singer’s former girl group Destiny’s Child when they insisted that their cheating men “Say my name, say my name.”

  Jay could have chosen to ride things out since only assumption, or innuendo, or shady allegation and hushed-mouth eye-rolling could link him to his wife’s acrimonious catharsis. He might have even been defiant in his denial and insisted that it was just music, just his wife’s genius to tap into the feminist zeitgeist and its yen for female heterotopias, for comforting places to affirm their sublime difference. He might have taken the fifth and remained silent. Instead, on June 30, 2017, he released 4:44, the antithesis not only to Lemonade but, truly, to the hem-hawing denials of men seeking to repatriate themselves to the monarchy of amnesia and the republic of avoidance.

  Jay’s self-critical rejoinders on 4:44 as he outed himself as the culprit are fairly unprecedented too. He clearly and straightforwardly admits his error, his sin, his failure. Of course, the implicit rebuff, often explicit protest, that underlay it all is How dare he cheat on one of the most amazing and beautiful women on the face of the earth? But that misses the point and undercuts Beyoncé’s ability to symbolize “all” women, any woman, just as Jay’s ability to embody all men doesn’t ride on his difference but his similarity to “all” men.

  We are forced to see the true source of the offense: the failure to honor the other in all we do, the failure to treat the other person as precious as ourselves, though, given the levels of self-hate and self-doubt that prevail, that standard may not ultimately hold either. It is, then, the failure to treat the other in a way that honors their worthiness to be respected as human beings regardless of beauty, standing, fame, or wealth. It is clear that Beyoncé takes a hit for the masses of women. But it’s also clear that she challenges outmoded ideas about why the offense she endured was not something that all women could identify with.

  Jay’s response on 4:44, and in interviews where he told his story, proves helpful because it models a masculine ethic of regard for the other as precious in herself, and that no matter the issues of self that rot one’s relationship to the other, no excuses can possibly prevent an open acknowledgment of injury inflicted. There wasn’t—and shouldn’t have been—great detail given about the offense. That is truly the business of Jay and Bey. What is important for the public face of their collective persona is the willingness of Beyoncé to vent and Jay to voice the truth of what she vented; for him to see the righteousness of the path she chose to express her pain and suffering; and for him not to erode its intensity or its integrity with even the subtle qualifications in which dishonesty and denial hibernate. That is important for all relationships, but in this case, it is especially important for black relationships.

  The Jay of 4:44 must be contrasted to the Jay of, say, “Big Pimpin’,” in which he touts a callous, unenlightened black masculinity that views women as instruments of pleasure, scorn, or distraction. When men claim we are emotionless, as JAY-Z did in his October 2009 O magazine interview with Oprah, we rarely mean it literally. Men who supposedly have no feelings express joy in material gain and economic success. We have little trouble expressing anger at those who violate our territory or code of male ethics. Emotionlessness in most men turns out to be a euphemism, or rather, a misdiagnosis of sorts; it often refers to a very specific kind of emotional intelligence that many men code as feminine. Expressions of vulnerability, shame, and, as sad as it may sound, love must be erased or strictly contained. This is as much a failure of the broader culture’s view of masculinity as it is the fault of any particular man. Thus Beyoncé takes on both generalized manhood and specifically unnamed masculinity. Unlike Jay in 4:44, some men claim an emotionless profile as a badge of honor. When we think of toxic masculinity, its roots often trace back to a perilously narrow set of experiences deemed legitimate or desirable as we men negotiate the space we occupy on earth. The toxicity saturates our perspectives of manhood, taints and damages us and our loved ones. It spills over in behaviors that demean, degrade, domestically abuse, and, in extreme cases, dispose of women without a sense of human compassion or the faintest trace of moral aptitude.

  JAY-Z’s confession of emotionlessness is a specific detachment of feeling that he honestly engages. The journey of JAY-Z from 2001’s “Song Cry,” about a man so emotionally constipated the tears couldn’t flow, so the song had to cry for him, to 2017’s “4:44,” illuminates the rapper’s moral and masculine evolution. Jay’s progress from heartless lothario in “Big Pimpin’” to soulful empathizer on 4:44 charts his own detox from the unfeeling JAY-Z persona that appealed to his fans into a better, humbler, and, yes, more emotional version of himself. Jay’s narrator in “Big Pimpin’” is ruthless in his carnal desires and erotic exploits. The narrator’s Iceberg Slim pimping pedigree is proudly promoted.

  You know I thug ’em, fuck ’em, love ’em, leave ’em

  ’Cause I don’t fuckin’ need ’em

  Take ’em out the hood, keep ’em lookin’ good

  But I don’t fuckin’ feed ’em

  First time they fuss I’m breezin’

  Talkin’ about, “What’s the reasons?”

  I’m a pimp in every sense of the word

  Contrast that to JAY-Z’s unadorned apology in the first line of “4:44,” and his confession of the damage wrought by infidelity, a perception that came home to him, literally, with the birth of his first daughter and later his twins:

  Look, I apologize, often womanize

  Took for my child to be born, see through a woman’s eyes

  Took for these natural twins to believe in miracles

  Took me too long for this song, I don’t deserve you

  Jay’s intentional turn away from poisonous patriarchy could help men who regard his past lyrical exploits as masculinist life manuals. Jay has proved in the past that his actions are consequential and paradigmatic. When Jay said “Change Clothes” in 2003, throwback jerseys—sports uniforms made to resemble team uniforms from the past—were discarded in lieu of “button-ups” and more traditional business attire. Yet a critical challenge remains. When Jay says to his life partner, “I apologize,” when he confesses his faults, his infidelity, and reveals his sheer vulnerability in the face of his own failures as a husband and father, can we follow suit?

  You matured faster than me, I wasn’t ready

  So I apologize

  I seen the innocence leave your eyes

  I still mourn this death and

  I apologize for all the stillborns ’cause I wasn’t present

  Your body wouldn’t accept it

  I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions

  ’Cause I was emotionless

  And I apologize ’cause at your best you are love

  And because I fall short of what I say I’m all about

  To follow in Jay’s path demands a death of ego that the artist expresses on the striking “Kill Jay Z,” where he acknowledges responsibility to his daughter Blue and to the young folk who idolize him:

  Kill Jay Z, they’ll never love you …

  And you know better, nigga, I know you do

  But you gotta do better, boy, you owe it to Blue

  Cry Jay Z, we know the pain is real

  But you can’t heal what you never reveal

  What’s up, Jay Z? You know you owe the truth

  To all the youth that fell in love with Jay Z

  Note, too, the semantic shift betokened in the change of the spelling of his name. He announced in the weeks before the debut of 4:44 that he was changing from Jay Z to JAY-Z, closing the gap once again in the two terms of his name, symbolically closing the gap in his own identity, perhaps, and emphasizing his new name, his new identity, as an all-in-caps truth that could be proudly trumpeted. The changing of names resonates in black life, especially, since black
folk were often denied the ability to name themselves. Fresh from enslavement, there was a riot of naming in the first flush of freedom. Jay’s real name, Shawn Carter, remains unchanged, but his public persona, his deliberately chosen linguistic vehicle of self-identification, matches his moral rebirth.

  Following Jay along the path of healthy masculinity also invites the sort of systematic self-inventory he conducted while in therapy. To be sure, there are huge stigmas attached to psychotherapy or even general psychological counseling in many parts of the culture. It must mean you’re crazy. It must mean you’re weak. It must mean your faith isn’t strong enough, that you haven’t held Jesus’s hand tightly enough. And, yes, there are cultural reasons that explain our particular skepticism as black folk too. Our mistreatment in the past, and too often in the present, by medical professionals doesn’t just scare us away from the medical doctor, or the psychiatrist, but it too often makes us wary of any sort of therapeutic intervention. The belief that God might somehow be offended by therapy reeks of the most blatant form of disbelief in God imaginable. After all, if God created both the patient and the therapist, then God has it under control and knew in advance the kind of help we’d need. To reject it is to reject the help for which too many folks pray yet turn their backs on when it is sent their way.