JAY-Z Read online

  Now please, domino, domino

  Only spot a few blacks the higher up I go, uh

  What’s up Will? Uh, shout out to O, uh

  That ain’t enough, we gonna need a million more, uh

  Nipsey’s murder is for many a cautionary tale against staying in the hood to help instead of seeking refuge in the suburbs. Nipsey’s life suggests the opposite is true: We need to flood working-class and poor communities with even more opportunities and majestic examples of neighborhood redemption.

  JAY-Z’s freestyle about Nipsey at Webster Hall featured as a prelude to his affecting “Some How Some Way,” a song that confesses the desire to “make it up out the hood some day.” On first blush it seems that Jay and Nipsey are at odds. But Jay ends his freestyle with a revealing couplet:

  And we ain’t gotta leave the hood physically

  But we gotta leave that shit mentally.

  Jay is invested in an ontology of ghetto existence that makes moral distinctions between helpful and destructive behavior. Not everything that happens in the ghetto should happen there. Contrary to the cliched credo, not all is good in the hood. It is not the physical geography that you have to escape but the destructive psychological habits and the existential threats that too often plague citizens of the hood.

  Jay had earlier in his career reflected on the contrast between a hardcore hood mentality and the intelligence and maturity of a “real” hustler who does big things in the bigger world. His 2009 song “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” proclaims,

  I don’t be in the project hallway

  Talking ’bout how I be in the project all day (uhh!)

  That sound stupid to me.

  He reinforces the point on 2009’s “What We Talkin’ About,” when he highlights the difference between faking violent acts on digital platforms and leaving the hardcore habits behind for a taste of political royalty.

  Now you could choose to sit in front of your computer

  Posin’ with guns, shootin’ YouTube up

  Or you could come with me to the White House, get your suit up!

  You stuck on being hardcore, I chuck the deuce up.

  But it was JAY-Z’s reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of Nipsey’s community activism on his Webster Hall freestyle that drew the strongest reaction. JAY-Z explained Nipsey’s efforts to revitalize and stabilize his neighborhood amid the foul winds of redlining, depressed assets, property seizures, a crabs-in-the-barrel mentality, the hardships of being hurt by some of the folk you aim to help, and the personal and financial distractions that hamper the pursuit of lasting goals and higher priorities. Jay did all of this in tight scope through a procession of carefully articulated a cappella bars. But controversy erupted over the first line he uttered in the effort to explain how structural forces like neighborhood design could foster a toxic environment for black urban dwellers.

  Gentrify your own hood, before these people do it

  Claim eminent domain and have your people move in

  That’s a small glimpse into what Nipsey was doing

  For anybody that’s still confused as to what he was doing.

  Critics on social media weighed in. They suggested that gentrification is the process of well-heeled, middle-class citizens or rich elites descending on a poor urban community and buying up and rehabbing its battered housing stock, causing a rise in property values and thus pushing out citizens because of financial hardship. Nipsey Hussle, they argued, was doing anything but that. Critics contended that JAY-Z was undermining Nipsey’s legacy by promoting renovation that comes at the expense of residents who are least able to afford homes in communities that are vastly overhauled. By taking JAY-Z literally, his critics overlooked his aim to broaden the scope of Nipsey’s work by highlighting his efforts to reconstitute the neighborhood through bright hustling and black entrepreneurship. Plus, Jay’s critics spoke as if eminent domain is a governmental prerogative that individuals have no control over. And they contended that black folk couldn’t, en masse, “buy back the block,” as Jay and others suggested, because they couldn’t get the loans and credit.

  Gentrification has undoubtedly had disastrous effects. Neighborhoods have been waylaid by heartless developers itching to empty them of the pesky poor to make room for upwardly mobile professionals. The character of communities has often been dramatically altered too. Communal rituals, neighborhood practices, informal arrangements, occasions of celebration, and local benchmarks of progress have been wiped away under the punishing directives of crassly calculated—and grossly mislabeled—community development. And resources for upgrading or refinancing housing have been dramatically shifted from those in need to those in pursuit of more space for elevated homeownership, higher-quality goods, and expanded services denied to long-term residents.

  Neither JAY-Z nor Nipsey ignored the devastating effects of gentrification. They both envisioned a healthy if complicated route to community development and neighborhood empowerment. When Jay urged black folk to take control of their hoods before others did so, he wasn’t unaware of the difficult path to such a goal, including lack of capital investment and stunted borrowing. But he, like Nipsey, refused to see obstacles as permanent or failed opportunities as final. Their motto seemed to be: To the hustler go the spoils. These men were indeed hustlers who had often made a way where none had previously existed. They worked, in their earlier lives, in informal, underground economies against the powers that be. What more might they achieve if they could leverage the legitimacy they now possess in cooperation with government agencies and political figures? Sure, their fame gives access and breaks that ordinary folk can’t get. But that didn’t mean that Jay and Nipsey couldn’t have led the way in opening opportunities in which others might participate. (And while eminent domain grants government the power to snatch private property for public use, that right can also be granted to corporations and individuals, a point that makes Jay’s claim far less ridiculous than many asserted.)

  Nipsey and his business partner, real estate investor David Gross, sought to use the political system to do just what Jay encouraged his listeners at Webster Hall to do. Nipsey also realized that he could generate projects that would facilitate investment by folk in the hood, granting them an ownership stake in their community economic development. Thus, Jay was right—they would gentrify their own hood before outside investors did. Sure, one could quibble with his wording, but it is clear that Jay and Nipsey were on the same page, had talked to each other about Nipsey’s plans, and understood the need to hustle to make opportunity rain down. Through Nipsey and Gross’s Our Opportunity investment fund, ordinary folk could enjoy economic development and invest in their own neighborhoods, not only in Los Angeles but, as the duo planned, in struggling communities across America.

  That’s why Nipsey was so beloved. At the time he died, not many people beyond his neighborhood knew about his forward-minded approach to community development. Nor did they realize just how big his heart and vision were. To his hood, he was them, and he realized that he became more of himself with their help. In giving back, he responded to their desire to be more like him and, therefore, helped them to become more of themselves.

  It seems that each day since Nipsey’s death more of his words surface and shed light on the secular scriptures he spat in rhyme. His death at thirty-three inevitably suggests the trope of resurrection, or at least a biblical reckoning with his time on earth. It may seem farfetched to ruminate on the rumbling of the divine amid the violence Nipsey confronted. If Jesus is too great a comparison, then perhaps Hussle’s notion of running a marathon is more in league with Apostle Paul. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” he said. Or as Hussle said, “Hopin’ as you walk across the sand you see my shoe print / And you follow ’til it change your life, it’s all an evolution.”

  Nipsey’s beliefs will continue to resonate because followers will keep his words alive. They will recite his lyrics, engage his ide
as, and show love to the people he loved, especially poor and working-class black and brown folk. Jay’s words will continue to echo because his words help keep us alive to truth. Their meaning couldn’t be more relevant than it is now in a cultural fight on many fronts. We now confront resurgent bigotry, increased antiblack sentiment, and the weaponizing of “otherness” to scare the white masses. Poor black folk need strong voices like JAY-Z’s in the culture to plead their case and defend their humanity.

  One of the greatest virtues of JAY-Z’s hustling is certainly how it inspires icons like LeBron and Nipsey. But it inspires millions of ordinary folks too. And it translates black ideas about society in a compelling fashion. Black hustle has transformed American life, from the underground to the playground, from tough streets to corporate suites, from the crack house to the White House. JAY-Z has created greater appreciation for black hustle by helping to launch hip hop into the cultural stratosphere. Once deemed a genre that was musically inferior and without artistic merit, hip hop has become the culture’s lingua franca and the globe’s measure of both cool and rebellion.

  It is noteworthy that a former crack dealer has transformed the image of black hustle by using the wiles of the underground to conquer American business. It is more remarkable that his historic rise is rooted in rhetoric, in words to explain black hustle and, therefore, black genius to the world. He has also adhered to a central tenet of hip hop: don’t defer to whiteness and don’t genuflect before the altar of American grammar. Instead, he invited America to bow at the shrine of hip hop’s language and to understand the genius of the black youth the country feared, ignored, detested, relegated to the projects, or forced into the underground.

  I made it so you could say Marcy and it was all good

  I ain’t crossover I brought the suburbs to the hood

  Made ’em relate to your struggle, told ’em ’bout your hustle

  Went on MTV with do-rags, I made them love you

  You know normally them people wouldn’t be fuckin’ witchu

  ’Til I made ’em understand why you do what you do

  Those lines from 1999’s “Come and Get Me” neatly sum up one of the great rationales of rap: to make “them people”—the people who control commerce and construct prisons, who assign seats in schools and give out jobs, who greenlight films and redline neighborhoods, who write scathing reports about black life, who pack poor blacks into ghettoes and leave healthy food out of the local grocery store, who largely loan money to folk who look like them, who give the benefit of the doubt to others in their own neighborhoods, who shoot black folk out of hate or fear—understand young black folk, particularly the poor and hurting.

  JAY-Z is the only rap superstar over 40 and there is no roadmap for how to sustain popularity, to fulfill expectations for what is the unarticulated norm. Thus, within his brilliance there has to be an idea or strategy for how to … transition … from lyrics of the 26 year old leaving drug dealing behind to telling stories of women in a way that lifts them up.

  TONI BLACKMAN

  By not acknowledging the deep visceral pleasures black youth derive from making and consuming culture … these authors reduce expressive culture to a political text … But what counts more than the story is the “storytelling”—an emcee’s verbal facility on the mic, the creative and often hilarious use of puns, metaphors, similes, not to mention the ability to kick some serious slang (or what we might call linguistic inventiveness).

  ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

  2

  “I Paint Pictures with Poems”

  POETRY

  As strange as it may sound, JAY-Z is an underrated rapper. Yes, he is recognized for his swaggering self-confidence and astonishing verbal gifts. But he is not nearly as celebrated for his vivid and extremely sophisticated romp on poetry’s playground of metaphor and metonymy, simile and synecdoche. He is Robert Frost with a Brooklyn accent, Rita Dove with a Jesus piece.

  Jay is a past master of American poesy. He composes in the recording studio with the tools of verse at hand. He is an architect of sound whose rhymes satisfy the ear. He is a painter of images whose visions flood the mind’s eye. He sketches verbal blueprints that map the black experience onto American rhetoric. As he makes his way to the recording booth, Jay stumbles over discarded stanzas, fumbles with multiple forms, trips on loitering tropes. He chisels away at the air until sound becomes sense and words are sculpted from mumbles. Meanwhile, Jay is ambushed by double entendres, and instead of turning them over to English authorities, he plays judge and jury and gives them long sentences.

  Jay’s lyrical cleverness masks his deeper intellectual reflections on the world and on black culture itself. Jay’s claim in “Moment of Clarity,” that “I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars,” is a misdirection of sorts. “Moment of Clarity” is one of the clearest explanations of the logic behind his approach to making commercial music with intellectual heft. Jay asks his listeners to study intently his body of work—from Reasonable Doubt to the Black Album, on which the song appears. He promises them that if they’ll “[l]isten close, you’ll hear what I’m about.”

  Jay realizes that the knock on him is that he treads water at the shallow end of the pool. In order to get his audience to at least hear what he has to say, and to discover how well he can handle the deep end, he has to first get them into the water—that is, sell records. By first advertising himself as an accessible pop culture figure, and not a daunting thinker, Jay can invite his listeners into the waters of reflection as an intellectual lifeguard of sorts with the promise that they won’t get in over their heads. This is the same man, after all, who had established his trustworthiness as a well-informed guide who wouldn’t burden his listeners with obscure language and esoteric ideas. In a battle with a foe who didn’t have to be named, Jay makes it plain that his opponent, known for being an intellectual heavyweight, was outwardly impressive but lacked true substance.

  And y’all buy the shit, caught up in the hype

  ’Cause the nigga wear a kufi, don’t mean that he bright

  ’Cause you don’t understand him, it don’t mean that he nice

  It just means you don’t understand all the bullshit that he write

  Jay argues on “Moment of Clarity” that if he took the tack of gifted rappers of conscience like Talib Kweli and Common he wouldn’t be commercially viable. Despite his admiration for them, their enormous skills haven’t created a big pay day or wide cultural influence. This isn’t the fault of the artists but a reflection of how the culture operates. Jay says that rappers must make up their minds about what their goals are and how they intend to achieve them. He makes clear that his goal is to help the poor—and his hustling history tells him that making music that sells is one way to do that. But he claims that underneath it all is a cunning intelligence that fosters strategies of wealth creation and resource sharing.

  Fuck perception! Go with what makes sense

  Since I know what I’m up against

  We as rappers must decide what’s most important

  And I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them

  So I got rich and gave back, to me that’s the win/win

  So next time you see the homie and his rims spin

  Just know my mind is working just like them (rims, that is)

  Jay’s edifying and strategic misdirection didn’t keep the depth of his gift from sounding through. His first album, Reasonable Doubt, teems with complex metaphors like these lines from “Can I Live”:

  My mind is infested with sick thoughts that circle

  Like a Lexus, if driven wrong it’s sure to hurt you

  Dual level like duplexes, in unity

  My crew and me commit atrocities like we got immunity

  And his rhymes revel in intricate wordplay, like this from “D’Evils”:

  She said the taste of dollars was shitty, so I fed her fifties

  About his whereabouts I wasn’t convinced

  I kept feedin’ her
money ’til her shit started to make sense.

  The eye more easily captures the meaning on a page, or onscreen, in hindsight, after careful reading, but the ear must hear the lyrics repeatedly to get their full meaning. Such is the nature of JAY-Z’s craft. The claim to dumb things down is meant to allay the fear of depth. Jay loses none of his sophistication in his strategy to say smart things in an accessible fashion. He layers his lyrics with multiple meanings; he waxes philosophical and poetic while keeping the party lights on.

  When Reasonable Doubt debuted in 1996, it wasn’t instantly hailed as a classic by critics. That designation had to wait a couple of years. In 1998, Source magazine, the hip hop Bible at the time, revised its initial rating of four out of five mics and gave the album a perfect five mics. Neither was the album eagerly snapped up by consumers. Reasonable Doubt wouldn’t garner platinum-level sales until 2002, by which time JAY-Z had become a big star. From that point forward, he left nothing to chance.

  Jay learned the lesson not to wear his learning so heavily. His strategy to obscure his erudition as he spoke his piece had many aspects. It was a matter of modifying his themes. Jay made a calculated effort to disguise his intelligence by scattering his philosophical reflections on life amid lyrical nods to the good life in clubs or cars. It was also a matter of proportion. For every “Minority Report,” reflecting on Hurricane Katrina, or “Young, Gifted & Black,” a colorful indictment of white privilege, there were many more of “I Just Wanna Love U (Give it 2 Me),” a gleeful ode to bacchanalia and booty.

  His approach was also a matter of placement and priority. Jay has made quite a few “B-sides,” songs not released as singles or deemed to be hits. These efforts afforded Jay greater freedom to explore his wide-ranging interests without fear that his complex wordplay or rich literacy might scare listeners away. Many of these songs contain the “eggs” he places on each album for aficionados to hunt for, for true lovers of Jay’s sophisticated poetry to seek out. A vibrant example is 1997’s “Streets Is Watching,” where Jay reflects on his divine destiny as he negotiates the treacherous code of the streets: