JAY-Z Read online

  The American creed has been defined by countless thinkers and activists and politicians since the beginning of the nation as a set of ideals that govern our existence—an appreciation for the individual, a thirst for equality, the demand of liberty, the quest for justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963, six years before Shawn Corey Carter was born, stood in Washington, D.C., on sacred civic ground in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall and dreamed out loud about an America that one day “will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” Through all of Jay’s hustling, versifying, and politicking, the American creed as King expressed it is what the self-proclaimed King of New York has in his own way sought to embody. It is the right time to gauge JAY-Z’s stride toward freedom as a cultural colossus and to take measure of his profoundly American desire to rise to the top here and around the globe while never forgetting the place and people from whence he came.

  In many ways, this is JAY-Z’s America as much as it is Obama’s America, or Trump’s America, or Martin Luther King’s America, or Nancy Pelosi’s America, or Maxine Waters’s America, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s America. JAY-Z has given this country a language to speak with, ideas to think through, and words to live by. His lyrics have shaped the self-understanding of a culture that grapples daily with racial and social justice. He is an important thinker and consequential artist, and instead of looking at hip hop or his life through the lens of, say, civil rights, or social respectability, or mainstream politics, it is time to see America through JAY-Z’s eyes.

  Rappers had long suggested that the music industry wasn’t much different from the drug world (as Biggie put it, “If I wasn’t in the rap game/I’d probably have a ki, knee-deep in the crack game”); now Jay-Z conflated Biggie’s eloquent thug and Puffy’s smooth executive to create the image of an utterly mercenary man who just happens to rap.

  KELEFA SANNEH

  As much as the hustler and hustler’s mentality is a newer phenomenon in black communities, it is a much older practice in larger white American society. It particularly reflects a combined ethos of the capitalist economic structure and the mythos of the self-made man.

  STEPHANY ROSE

  1

  “I’m the Definition of It”

  HUSTLING

  Let’s begin with what even his greatest admirers may miss: JAY-Z is a prescient theorist of American history. No, he hasn’t shaped our conception of the New World through prodigious research. He hasn’t presented, like Voltaire, a philosophie de l’histoire. He hasn’t floated a new interpretation about the American Revolution. Neither has he unveiled a shiny new understanding of the Civil War. But he has offered a theory of history, explored in the magnificent obsession of his art and career: hustling. Jay was at least a decade ahead of Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Walter McDougall, who contends in his 2004 book Freedom Just Around the Corner that hustling is the central motif of American history, the dominant measure of the American character.

  Surveying the national scene, McDougall turns to long-ago literary lights like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Willa Cather, and more recent writers like William Safire, to buttress his claim that Americans “are … prone to be hustlers.” McDougall says this doesn’t mean that Americans possess “a nature different or worse than other human beings,” but that they have “enjoyed more opportunity to pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in history.” There is certainly a duality to hustling, a good and bad side determined by what form the activity takes and the moral environment in which it takes root and flourishes. On the one hand, writes McDougall, Melville was on the mark “to portray Americans as hustlers in the sense of self-promoters, scofflaws, occasional frauds, and peripatetic self-reinventers.” On the other hand, hustlers flashed positive attributes as “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organizers, engineers, and a people supremely generous.”

  McDougall is careful to show both the glory and grief of hustling, its virtues and vices. But in my view, some of the most prominent defenders of the American self-image, be they right-wing evangelicals or gung-ho nationalists, relentlessly cast hustling as a solely positive example of our pluck and persistence. They often uncritically endorse questionable American enterprises and unjust exploits around the globe driven by imperial quests and a troubling hunger for global dominion. It is a national character trait that is applauded by its most zealous advocates. But hustling is rightly seen by its victims on foreign shores and those in our backyard as the menacing strike of Americanist ideology. Those outside the nation have felt the whip of American empire on their backs. Those closer to home have been lashed in the face by a nation that praises white hustle but despises such agency in their darker kin.

  Before we can understand what JAY-Z has done to hustling, and how he has inspired two other cultural icons, we’ve got to understand what hustling has done to black America.

  * * *

  Black hustle has been scorned as long as black humanity has been despised and black intelligence has been questioned. The roots of black hustle run deep into slavery, where black labor largely existed on white demand. Black folk had limited time or space to themselves to enjoy their labor or lives. They lived literally off the books at the margins of white society. Most things they did for themselves, like getting married, were illegal, and reading was potentially deadly. Even when black folk were freed, Jim Crow brought different kinds of restrictions. Black folk were denied access to equal education, employment, and other social goods and services. Black strivers created voluntary associations of mutual support, such as social clubs and fraternal groups. They also created religious and civic organizations to uplift their less-fortunate kin. But underground and informal networks of affiliation also thrived for ambitious citizens who were neither well educated nor financially well off. These folks struggled to survive through a range of off-the-books pursuits in the underground economy: running numbers, bootlegging liquor, fencing stolen goods, gambling, racketeering, dealing drugs, selling sex, and other illicit activities.

  Black hustling was in part the effort to take hold of the American Dream that was touted to the white masses. On 2006’s “Oh My God,” Jay lays claim to that dream. He doesn’t simply hustle, but he hustles the story of hustling, and thereby engages in a kind of meta-hustling. Jay tells a story that celebrates its own narrative as the manifestation of hustling. The song also becomes a conduit for hustling’s spirit and goal. His story is at once representative and unique, both specific and universal. His blackness gives even more color to hustling’s story of rising from the bottom to the top to fulfill the American Dream, and, as his name suggests, his divine destiny.

  So if this is your first time hearing this

  You’re about to experience someone so cold

  A journey seldom seen, the American dream

  From the bottom to the top of the globe they call me Hov

  On 2007’s “American Dreamin’,” JAY-Z’s narrator is frustrated that circumstances have thwarted his plans to achieve the American Dream of material rewards through a college education. In the narrator’s case, and that of his peers, their dreams are realized through hustling because school isn’t an option, times are urgent, and food and other resources are scarce.

  This is the shit you dream about

  With the homies steaming out

  Back-to-back, backing them Bimmers out

  Seems as our plans to get a grant

  Then go off to college, didn’t pan or even out

  …

  Mama forgive me, should be thinking about Harvard

  But that’s too far away, niggas are starving

  As with Jay’s hustler, black folks’ lives have been shaped by restrictions on social mobility, economic prosperity, employment opportunities, and housing prospects. Some black folk managed to thrive despite these restrictions because of superior networks of support
and encouragement. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries black folk built strong black businesses and stable black schools in all-black neighborhoods. Those who fell between the cracks, like Jay’s narrator in present-day America, were often left to fend for themselves. It was difficult enough for stable or well-to-do black people to survive in a culture that oppressed black folk at every turn. It was virtually impossible for blacks without formal education or social standing to make it without helping themselves in the underground economy.

  The brutal class bifurcation between the black thrivers and the black thrashed persists to this day. Big forces loom that punish the black poor. There are broad shifts in the economy away from manufacturing. There are the rise of the knowledge economy and the proliferation of automated technologies that displace human labor. There is the expansion of service industries that call for extensive retraining. And there is the vast re-segregation of public schools. These conditions make the underground inescapable, the best among bad options.

  Black hustle has at least three meanings. First, it describes a plight and condition. Like Immanuel Kant’s Ding an sich, it is the thing-in-itself, the game, the hustle. (As Jay said, “You can’t knock the hustle,” and when he said it in 1996, his hustle was rapping, and his “job” was selling drugs.) Second, it expresses, as a verb, an activity, the performance of a hustle. Third, as a noun, it names the person who is the hustler. The hustle, the plight, the condition, is what black folk are caught in when their resources are depleted, their access to legitimate goods severely restricted, their ability to enjoy social and educational equality greatly curtailed. The hustle is the main resort for those who are systematically deprived of benefits and advantages in society. The hustle beckons those who are excluded from privilege and power. Hustling, the action, the performance, is embraced because it often provides the only relief from economic misery. The hustler is determined not to suffer silently and turns distress to opportunity.

  On 1999’s “Dope Man,” Jay’s frail narrator indicts a racist society for destroying black dreams of education and professional success. He also accuses society of flooding black neighborhoods with drugs, thus leaving him and his peers little choice but to hustle.

  A-hem, I’m a prisoner of circumstance

  Frail nigga, I couldn’t much work with my hands

  But my mind was strong, I grew where you hold your blacks up

  Trap us, expect us not to pick gats up

  Where you drop your cracks off by the Mack trucks

  Destroy our dreams of lawyers and actors

  Keep us spiralin’, goin’ backwards

  Like Jay’s narrator on “Dope Man,” poor black youth routinely confront enormous odds. Poor chances at a good education and a good job leave them in grave peril. Social scientists such as Tatiana Adeline Thieme say that young folk in places like the Middle East and Africa who face similar conditions are caught in a version of “waithood” between childhood and adulthood. “Waithood” is a period of artificially prolonged adolescence.

  The economic and social forces that stagnate progress force some of the youth into the underground economy. The tragedy is that too often this isn’t the exception but the rule for American black youth. They are denied opportunities that would propel them into stable adulthood. They are often seen as less worthy of support in the achievement of milestones set for other youth. There is, instead, for many black youth, a “weighthood”: heavy economic and social burdens weigh on their shoulders and keep them from rising.

  Their condition is exacerbated by another factor: studies show that black youth are often perceived as older than they are, that adolescents are perceived as adults. They are subject to harsher treatment for misbehavior and perceived social offenses, and suffer consequences usually reserved for adults. Thus, while their progress is delayed, American black youth are abruptly rushed into adulthood without support or nurture. They are often hemmed in by a society that seeks to crush them, an underground that exposes them to high risk, and a culture that disdains their blackness. Black youth get involved in the hustle out of necessity. They hustle to stay alive, and the hustlers among them are both reviled and revered. They are, in essence, acrobats of competing liminalities. They swing among rival transitional existences in schools that don’t cherish them, justice systems that stigmatize them, and underground cultures that may end up killing them.

  Positive, legitimate, legal black hustling can be termed bright hustling. It encompasses a wide range of activities: creating multiple streams of income, renting a room in your house, earning passive income through real estate investments, opening a small business, building banks, donating blood for money, coming up with a computer software app for mobile devices, getting a Ph.D., playing professional sports, becoming a lawyer, doctor, engineer, hairdresser, barber, factory worker or accountant, and just doing everything in one’s power to get ahead. It rests on the intellectual efforts that have the best chance of being cherished and celebrated, and which thrive in the well-lit arenas of wholesome cultural enterprise. There is of course no assurance that such efforts will be supported in the mainstream. Black folk have always had to defend their right to be go-getters. Even legal hustling has often been viewed as intrinsically troubling.

  For a long spell, especially under Jim Crow, bright hustling was seen as disruptive to white society. Bright hustling often thrived as a valiant complaint against social injustice, since whites made every effort to shut it down. In fact, bright hustling was often viewed as no better than criminal behavior. Black folk with drive and ambition were viewed as uppity and disrespectful. They were made to feel guilty for striving after honest work and valid rewards. Their industry was viewed as that of the bandit. Bright hustlers were seen as moral renegades and lawbreaking anarchists. The notion that black folk could create their own businesses and make their way in the world because of brains angered white folk to no end. Legitimate black striving may as well have been illegal activity. White society sought to outlaw black prosperity as much as possible, and where the law couldn’t work, then violence came into play. The remarkable show of black entrepreneurship in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, in an area dubbed “Black Wall Street,” provoked extraordinary white vengeance. White mobs used guns, incendiary devices, explosives, and airplanes to destroy what was then the nation’s wealthiest black community.

  The illegal, illicit, underground dimensions of black hustling can be termed blight hustling. Besides the off-the-books underground activities cited above, it includes far less offensive illegal enterprises like selling “loosies” (single cigarettes) from packs without tax stamps, an activity that led to Eric Garner’s tragic death by cops in New York City in 2014, or selling bootleg music and movies, as Alton Sterling did in 2016 outside a Baton Rouge store before he suffered the same fate as Garner. It is the kind of hustling carried on at the corners of the culture when other avenues are roadblocked.

  In between bright and blight hustling lies site hustling, which names a far more ambiguous state of affairs. Site hustling uses locales—the street, the abandoned apartment, the garbage dump, the lawn—as the scenes of everyday struggles for survival. It is at these sites, among others, where folk, for instance, collect discarded bottles and cans or steel and iron for money. It is where they find temporary shelter. It is where they gather the remnants of discarded food. Or it is where they cut grass or lay sod for wages that are not reported. All of this happens off the grid and beyond formal work. It occurs in a make-do, soft, underground economy that is informal but certainly not dramatically illegal. Site hustlers often face persistent precarity in the face of unreliable resources.

  JAY-Z’s hustling is a two-pronged affair. First, Jay raps about his former days as a hustler, making his former illicit activity, and the ill-gotten gains from his illegal enterprise, the subject of his present hustle. If the Supreme Court can declare that corporations are people and money is speech, then Jay is right to demand that, “We can talk, but money talks, so talk
mo’ bucks,” in recognition that

  I’m not a businessman; I’m a business, man!

  Let me handle my business, damn.

  That is the Hustler’s Credo in a cunning couplet.

  Second, Jay has fully transitioned from underground to aboveground economies, and thus has redeemed hustling as a positive behavior for himself and others like him. Jay in his bright hustling mode has not only turned repeatedly to hustling for artistic inspiration. He has also served as a gifted interpreter of blight hustling’s harsh necessities. He has argued that such hustling can’t help but occur in a country that sees its dark citizens as disposable. But he has been careful also to lament the fatal downside of hustling. He has often expressed an ambivalence about the hustling life, spoken of the regrets one has to live with in order to survive. On 1996’s “Regrets,” Jay’s narrator says:

  Coppers was watchin’ us through nighttime binoculars

  …

  Make me wanna holler back at the crib in the sauna

  Prayin’ my people bailed out like TimeWarner

  Awaitin’ a call, from his kin, not the coroner

  Phone in my hand, nervous confined to a corner

  Beads of sweat, second thoughts on my mind

  How can I ease the stress and learn to live with these regrets?

  Beginning on his first album, Jay offered crucial insight about blight hustling’s raison d’être. “Well, we hustle out of a sense of hopelessness,” he announces on the spoken intro to “Can I Live,” before reciting his verse. “Sort of a desperation. Through that desperation, we become addicted. Sort of like the fiends we accustomed to servin’.” Time and again Jay establishes, between those who sell coke and those who smoke it, a bittersweet communion in their symbiotic addictions. This unites those who are the merchants of crystallized death and those whose addictive consumption of crack crystallized an entire generation’s social death. What social critic Mike Davis in his book City of Quartz calls “the political economy of crack” not only afforded opportunities for drug dealers and other hustlers, but it increased community social disorder and chaos in its wake. Hustling both fueled and fed off the hopelessness of ghettoes across the country. It is that hopeless condition that led Jay to sell cocaine “til brains was fried to a fricassee.” It kept him from worrying over the loss of human capital or life. But he finally grappled with the cost of his hustle in the redeeming retrospect that art offers.