JAY-Z Read online

  Hip hop artists enjoy the freedom to say in their music things that many athletes wish they could say. No one has captured the spirit of ball and response more than JAY-Z, redefining swagger as he brags on his recording “Public Service Announcement”:

  I got a hustler spirit, nigga, period

  Check out my hat yo, peep the way I wear it

  Check out my swag’ yo, I walk like a ballplayer

  No matter where you go, you are what you are player.

  Rappers want to be ballers; JAY-Z frequently refers to himself in the same breath as Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Ballers want to be rappers; the athlete-rapper moniker runs from Shaquille O’Neal and Iman Shumpert to Damian “Dame D.O.L.L.A.” Lillard. JAY-Z has mastered both realms: he is a world-class rapper with a sports agency and has iconic status in professional basketball. He has also infused rap and basketball with the charismatic ghetto swag that has taken him from the Marcy Projects to Barclays Center.

  Perhaps JAY-Z’s and LeBron’s most important contribution lies beyond the gilded fields of performance they have both ingeniously explored. The civil rights generation, and even the Michael Jordan generation, had to convince the mainstream that they were worthy of acceptance through appropriate dress and diction. JAY-Z and LeBron have, in contrast, embraced Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” And they’ve taken it further: if you are better than the best and build a compelling brand, the world will beat a path to your door and you can dress and speak any damn way you please. Or as JAY-Z put it: “Ball so hard muhfuckas wanna fine me / But first niggas gotta find me.”

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  If JAY-Z’s mentorship in hustling inspired LeBron, it also encouraged another figure who, like Jay, hustled in the streets before he turned his talents to the microphone. Like LeBron, this person had an impoverished upbringing and faced equally tough choices in the hood; unlike LeBron, his story ended violently on the very streets on which he had once hustled. The titanic wave of grief let loose by rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle’s grotesque murder in March 2019 on the street outside his Los Angeles clothing store was at once astonishing and completely understandable. He was, to be sure, a gifted artist who had put out a slew of mixtapes for a decade. But he had only recently emerged on the national scene in 2018 with Victory Lap, his first major-label album. He was deeply loved in Los Angeles because he was profoundly committed to his neighborhood, to its economic revitalization, its physical restoration, its moral and social uplift—and to tapping its long-ignored geographical advantages. His commitment was so ironclad that he was christened “Neighborhood Nip.” The massive mourning around the country in the wake of his death testified to the deep nerve he struck in the nation’s conscience. His selfless gestures were more than charity, more than animated altruism; they were, instead, the passionate devotion of a man out for justice for his people.

  Among the most sorely aggrieved was JAY-Z, who had supported Nipsey’s early entrepreneurial exploits, his bright hustling, when he purchased, for $100 each, 100 copies of Hussle’s independently released 2013 mixtape Crenshaw. Jay eventually mentored Nipsey and applauded his desire to remain rooted in his community. Still, like many others, Jay anguished over the cruel paradox of Nipsey’s death: that he perished in the hood he refused to leave because he wanted to provide a promising future for just the sort of man who eventually took his life.

  I never dreamed that he get killed in the place that he called home

  How we gonna get in power if we kill the source?

  Nearly a month after Nipsey’s shocking slaughter, Jay spat those words at New York’s Webster Hall in a somber soliloquy as the music halted and his voice rang across the iconic venue.

  I be going to sleep hoping Nip visit me

  That young king had a lot of jewels to split with me.

  Nipsey possessed many jewels of wisdom indeed. Viewing video recordings of Jay’s already legendary freestyle for Nipsey brought to mind a line of lamentation from Hussle’s final single: “How you die thirty somethin’ after banging all them years?” Nipsey posed that question about a fallen colleague on a song released about a month before he met a similar fate. The ex-gangbanger Hussle said he took to the “sauna sheddin’ tears / All this money, power, fame and I can’t make you reappear.”

  Yet Nipsey, although absent in body, is present in spirit more than ever. How does a rapper who was just coming into his own fill the Staples Center for his funeral and cast a spell over a society that barely knew his name the day he died? When news of Nipsey’s death spread, it shook us because his lanky 6-foot, 4-inch frame carried the hopes and aspirations of his community and, we soon discovered, of so many more communities like his across the country. His accent was distinctly black American. His face, unquestionably African. The ink on his body was rooted in part in gang culture. The style of his everyday dress was unapologetically urban. And yet he touched folk far beyond his native soil and society.

  One reason Hussle’s death gripped the collective imagination is because his story fit into competing narratives across an ideological spectrum. While some folk advocate pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, he showed that he believed in hustling and hard work and black uplift and self-reliance and he started several businesses in the hood. He may as well have been Booker T. Washington in a baseball cap. While some folk are motivated to fight the powers that be, Nipsey believed in a politics of justice for the oppressed and poor. He joined fellow rapper YG on a song indicting Donald Trump: “I’m from a place where you prolly can’t go / Speakin’ for some people that you prolly ain’t know.”

  But the main reason his story is so compelling is because love was at the core of his beliefs and behavior. Love of his craft. Love of his blackness. Love of his neighborhood. Love of his partner, the actress Lauren London, and of their children. In Instagram posts and other social media outlets, and in a 2019 spread in GQ magazine, the couple cemented their reputation as hood royalty and a younger generation’s version of JAY-Z and Beyoncé. And, belatedly, across the nation, in vigils and outpourings of unashamed adoration, the nation showed its love of Hussle for loving so faithfully while few of us knew or paid attention. His death is even more haunting because the love he showed took place against the backdrop of unsettling violence, both real and artistically imagined, both in structural forces and intimate spaces, often conjured or measured by his own pen.

  Hussle captured both his métier and his pedigree when he dubbed himself on his song “Dedication” the “2Pac of my generation,” a clear-eyed if fatal prophecy. There are certainly differences. Tupac’s resonant baritone, steeped in the sonic registers of the East and West coasts where he came of age, echoed eerily across the artistic and social landscape and garnered him global fame before death made him a transcendent icon. Nipsey’s voice drawled in a Southern cadence inflected with California bravado that produced a Louisiangeles accent. Death greatly amplified that sound. Both Pac and Nip were transformed in death from hood griots to ghetto saints, from verbal magicians to generational martyrs.

  Like Pac, Nip was a restless creator of rhymes, foraging through his welter of experiences, and those of his peers, to mine narrative gold in a relentless series of mixtapes. On the tragically prescient Bullets Ain’t Got No Name, Vol. 1, he probes, like many before him, South Central LA’s underground political economy, with its attendant street carnage. Nipsey’s contribution is a clever deconstruction of the Blood/Crip binary by noting that Crips bang on Crips while Bloods take out Bloods. On The Marathon, arguably his best effort next to Victory Lap, Nip feels less compelled to establish what hood he’s from. That neighborhood was Slauson, which he settled on his first mixtape, Slauson Boy Vol. 1. It figures in Nipsey’s canon as his answer to legendary hip hop debuts like Nas’s Illmatic or JAY-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. His violent calling card of banging and slanging is clear. And yet in The Marathon he articulates a politics of pos
sibility that crystalizes in the figure of the marathon.

  The marathon trope found repeated use and now looms as Nipsey’s legacy hashtag: the long haul of life, with planning for the future, something so many of his peers were denied or felt was impossible to achieve. On Nip Hussle the Great Vol. 2, Nipsey eloquently explores a theme that resounded loudly, brutally, in bitter irony, after his death: that hustling and “coming up” in the hood breeds seething jealousy and paralyzing envy. Nip brags, in a luminous line of vernacular poetry, that he “turns innocence into militance,” while lesser, more hateful peers are turned into murderous zealots. On Crenshaw, Nip propagates, as a homegrown anthropologist of sorts, a holistic hoodism, a complicated, nuanced, colorful view of the neighborhood through the eyes of one of its most prolific partisans. “Broke niggas die slow / while the rich get richer,” he observes.

  All of his mixtapes have been rhetorical legs along a marathon of building expression—the lyrical speeds vary, the cadences dip and swerve, the flows change pace and purpose. Nip was right to take a bow to the end of one phase of his career and welcome the beginning of another: running in the mainstream, his verbal arms swiping at the air around him, his literary feet kicking high behind him, his artistic eyes on the mark of his high calling before him. “I’m prolific, so gifted / I’m the type that’s gon go get it, no kiddin’,” an ode to a Melvillean view of hustling for sure. Just as JAY-Z has done, Nip constantly combated anti-intellectualism. “They tell me, ‘Hussle dumb it down, you might confuse ’em.’” He refused. “Know he a genius, he just can’t claim it / ’Cause they left him no platform to explain it.” Hussle garnered a Grammy nomination for Victory Lap and seemed poised to be recognized as one of the most important figures in hip hop, or, as he rapped it, “the street’s voice out west.”

  He loved his craft, and he used it to talk about how much he loved his neighborhood too. While others poured stigma on his community, he showered love on Slauson Avenue, on Crenshaw Boulevard, located in the heart of the Crenshaw district in South Los Angeles, redeeming these demonized geographies often left to their own devices. He didn’t just represent them in song, as important as that was, but he offered the hood a green economy—as in dollar bills—and opened business doors that had been closed to neighborhood citizens. (The burger joint that formerly forbade young black folk from “loitering” on its premises had to pay rent to Nipsey when he bought the Crenshaw strip mall it was housed in.) He turned hustling to hope, destruction to dreams, and banging to bucks. He fed, clothed, and housed in his businesses the aspirations of a neighborhood.

  Nipsey loved and embraced his blackness, a blackness that was bigger than the sum of its intriguing parts. He was every bit the unapologetic patron of South Central Los Angeles, with odes to hustling, banging, and higher aspirations too. But when he was eighteen he traveled to Eritrea to embrace his East African roots in his father’s homeland. In 2018, Nipsey, his brother, and his father made another pilgrimage to their Eritrean Motherland to learn more from their proud soil of blackness. The voyage gave Nipsey renewed inspiration for his reverse-gentrification Husslenomics: Own your master recordings, master your own entrepreneurial terrain, recycle capital in the hood by reinvesting earnings back into the people and places that inspired your art.

  There is broad discussion about the futility of narrow views of blackness and the need to emphasize the transatlantic routes of black identity. Nipsey embodied the crisscrossing and crosscutting ways of global blackness and the awareness that no one culture or country or tribe has ownership of a blissfully variegated blackness. It was that sense of blackness that linked a scholar like me and a rapper like him when we shared a five-hour flight in 2018 from Los Angeles to New York. “Are you Michael Eric Dyson?” he asked as he slid into the seat next to me. “I read your books.” “Yes, sir. Are you Nipsey Hussle?” I replied as I showed him that I had downloaded his latest album on my smartphone. “I listen to your music.” We both smiled. We had an epic conversation. He brought up the psychologist Abraham Maslow, and we discussed Hussle’s journey from gangbanging to hip hop, and especially our unblushing love for black culture.

  Nipsey’s murder reveals a darker side of blackness: The revelation that the man charged with killing Nipsey is named Eric Holder, the same as the first black United States attorney general, is an unavoidable metaphor of the destructive doppelganger that often lurks in black life. That for all the effort to do well and be right, there are opposing forces that seek to subvert, distract, and destroy. Nipsey was a more delightful doppelganger, borrowing his nom de plume from Nipsey Russell, the black comedian known as the poet laureate of television whose comedy reveled in aphorism and rhymes.

  Nipsey’s demise has caused some to rally anew against black-on-black violence or to argue that staying in the hood is the problem, that one should pull up stakes. Both arguments merit consideration. Black-on-black crime is best seen as a problem of proximity, not pigment. A disturbing number of those who live in deprived communities without resource or option may indeed wreak havoc. But the same was true for white ethnics who lived in ghettoes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Harvard professor Khalil Muhammad argues in The New York Times, at the turn of the century, white figures like Harvard economist William Ripley and prominent social worker Jane Addams worked hard to rescue poor white communities plagued by violence from being further victimized by stigma, isolation, and fear. As white youth gang-related gun violence spiked, Addams “insisted that everyone from the elite to community organizers to police officers had a part to play.” Muhammad says that white progressives “mobilized institutional resources to save killers and the future victims of killers,” flooded violent white neighborhoods “with social workers, police reformers, and labor activists committed to creating better jobs and building a social welfare net,” and then, predictably, white-on-white violence “fell slowly but steadily in proportion to economic development and crime prevention.”

  Black folk were treated quite differently. Black crime and violence evoked no compassion from white progressives but instead, as Muhammad argues, reinforced racist beliefs that black folk were their “own worst enemies.” This led to the criminalization of black people “through various institutions and practices, whether Southern chain gangs, prison farms, convict lease camps and lynching bees or Northern anti-black neighborhood violence and race riots.” The criminalization of black folk carries into the present; black people are seen, Muhammad says, as “dangerous, legitimizing or excusing white-on-black violence, conflating crime and poverty with blackness, and perpetuating punitive notions of ‘justice’—vigilante violence, stop-and-frisk racial profiling and mass incarceration—as the only legitimate responses.”

  Of course, explaining that neighborhood more than color shapes crime doesn’t relieve the horrors of black-on-black carnage. After citing studies that show that between 1989 and 1994 more black men were murdered in America than lost their lives during the Vietnam War, JAY-Z, in his memoir Decoded, says that the nation “did not want to talk about the human damage, or the deeper causes of the carnage.” But then the American nightmare of black violence—and the blunt insistence that it was caused in large measure by the neglect of black communities—came to life in rap in the late seventies. Rap music forced the country to confront its ugly denial and see clearly the costs of its racist legacy. Jay says that the “volume and urgency [of hardcore rap] kept a story alive that a lot of people would have preferred to disappear.” Yet it must be acknowledged that anti-black animus haunts black psyches too, and the self-hatred, and hatred of the black other, is certainly encouraged in a society not yet purged of white supremacy.

  On the searing track “Murder to Excellence,” which appears on 2011’s Watch the Throne, JAY-Z’s album-length collaboration with Kanye West, the pair lament black-on-black crime. Jay, on the first part of the song, pleads for mutual respect among black men. He also calls out police killings of unarmed black folk and dedicates the verse
to one such victim. Yet he assails the destructive impulse of black men to kill each other.

  This is to the memory of Danroy Henry

  Too much enemy fire to catch a friendly

  Strays from the same shade nigga, we on the same team

  Giving you respect, I expect the same thing

  All-black everything, nigga you know my fresh code

  I’m out here fighting for you, don’t increase my stress load

  The second part of the song offers an unusual antidote to black death—black wealth and the access that Jay and Kanye’s fame and fortune afford them. The song presents a provocative juxtaposition: decrying the violence that plagues mostly poor black communities and celebrating black exceptionalism as a tool of racial self-defense. Both Jay and Kanye rap about the exclusivity of black-tie affairs and what it means to sometimes be the only black guy in the room. Still, access to the upper echelons of American society, for Jay, Kanye, or anyone else, can hardly erase the social ills that dog the American experiment or substitute for social justice.

  In Jay’s third verse on “Murder to Excellence,” he uses the game of dominoes as a metaphor for racial inequality. The player with the fewest number of black spots, or pips, on a domino tile wins with the higher score. The higher Jay rises, the fewer black folks he sees, and more white people come into play. Jay argues that it will take more than the success of token black elites like Will Smith and Oprah Winfrey to bring equality to the black masses: