JAY-Z Read online

  Was this a lesson God teaching me? Was he saying that

  I was playing the game straight from Hell from which few came back?

  Like bad coke, pimp or die, was my mind frame back

  When niggas was thinking simplify, was turning cocaine crack

  Ain’t a whole lot of brain to that, just trying to maintain a stack

  On 2002’s “Don’t You Know,” Jay celebrates his embodiment of the poetic vocation by personifying his craft.

  Won’t you throw in the towel? I’m better with vowels

  My vocabulary murders the dictionary

  Flow switches every 16, shit mean, man

  …

  Nigga I’m poetry

  In four-part harmony, it’s like Jodeci

  Check out my melody, my flow is a felony.

  Jay returned on later songs to the tension between art and commerce. He said, point blank on “The Prelude,” in 2006, that “Bein’ intricate’ll get you wood, critic.” Wood, as in a disc not going platinum, or gold, but selling very few records. On 1998’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” Jay reminded his audience of its offense:

  I gave you prophecy on my first joint, and y’all all lamed out

  Didn’t really appreciate it ’til the second one came out.

  In 2007, on “Ignorant Shit,” before he begins to rap, Jay complains about the lukewarm critical reception of his previous album, 2006’s Kingdom Come.

  Y’all niggas got me really confused out there

  I make “Big Pimpin” or “Give it 2 Me,” one of those

  Y’all hail me as the greatest writer of the 21st century

  I make some thought provokin’ shit

  Y’all question whether he fallin’ off?

  Jay’s one-time rival Nas said it directly on “Let There Be Light”: “I can’t sound smart, ’cause y’all will run away.”

  Still, Jay’s lyric from “Moment of Clarity” has social and racial purpose: Jay can preserve the complex and coded conversations he has in his music, for instance, with folk who are still hustling or with those whose racial struggles tie them to him. And then, at his discretion, he can, as the title of his memoir suggests, decode his work, both for those who are new to his lyrics and for those who wonder just what he may have had in mind as they pore over his secular scriptures.

  Perhaps we have not given him sufficient credit because our bias against hip hop artists won’t let us see that the best of them have at the ready an army of narrative techniques to tell their stories and spread their truths. Jay has proved his mettle and pedigree as a poet through the sophisticated use of literary devices and refined craft. He has proved it by arguing persuasively that intelligence is a highly desirable good. He’s shown it through the use of hyperbole and braggadocio, and by his ingenious extension of the black oral tradition. He’s also given us a glimpse of his poetic gifts, and underscored his remarkable longevity, by engaging three of the greatest artists of his time.

  He had beef in the late nineties and early aughts with legendary wordsmith and Queens MC Nas. He had brotherhood and camaraderie with fellow Brooklyn icon The Notorious B.I.G. (born Christopher Wallace) before Biggie’s murder in 1997. And, on and off, over the last decade, he has had collaborations and competition with biracial Canadian rap superstar Drake. He and Drake have in particular clashed over how Jay uses poetry to spotlight visual art.

  Jay not only enthusiastically embraces the visual and performance arts, but he grapples with his identity as a hustler, with racial strife and black identity, with black cultural habits and traits, and with the function of art, high and low, in the pursuit of meaningful existence. He has also used poetry to probe the relationship between rappers and superheroes.

  If critics miss Jay’s literary sophistication, his high intelligence, his cosmopolitan cultural habits, his adroit readings of social life, his adept deconstructions of pop culture, his public intellectual labor, perhaps it is because, as JAY-Z says, they insist on a shallow reading of his art. They end up doing, ironically enough, the very thing they accuse him of, namely, sticking to the surface. Jay summarizes the claim and counters it on 2001’s “Renegade,” produced by Eminem:

  Motherfuckers say that I’m foolish, I only talk about jewels (Bling bling)

  Do you fools listen to music, or do you just skim through it?

  See, I’m influenced by the ghetto you ruined

  The same dude you gave nothin’, I made somethin’ doin’

  What I do, through and through and

  I give you the news with a twist, it’s just his ghetto point of view.

  In the opening lines of “Streets Is Watching,” JAY-Z’s classic treatise on drug dealer paranoia and angst, he seizes on the question of intelligence in hustling, hip hop, and beyond, and sends it our way.

  Look, if I shoot you, I’m brainless

  But if you shoot me, then you’re famous

  What’s a nigga to do?

  Jay poses the rhetorical question like it’s an existential crisis. For those hustling on the corner, it is surely a Rubicon that, once crossed, commits them to action. Rhetoric and performance are now tied in Jay’s view; they are critical to answer the question of how one uses what one learns to set a new standard for wisdom and behavior. All of this is driven by a regard for how acute observation and tough-minded reflection can help one to navigate the perils of the underground economy and to flourish while there—that is, as long as one can stay alive while plotting one’s elevation or escape. There is the possibility that the narrator might act, or shoot, without proper forethought, without counting the cost. Thus, there is reckoning with the mortal effects of the drug dealing enterprise in toto. There is, too, grappling with the consequences of specific actions. In particular, there is the potential for brainless decisions that can turn fatal within the cutthroat capitalism of the underground drug world.

  Even after many listens, one thing is clear: the opening lyrics and the song itself are smarter than they sound. The narrator urges listeners to “Smarten up, the streets is watching.” His audience includes all sorts of hustlers, and himself as well, a dealer-turned-artist who has had to make smart decisions in his transition out of the drug economy. The song presents a pitch-perfect personification of the “streets” as an urban proxy of the surveillance state. Jay’s narrator also makes multiple references to his state of mind to paint a bleak picture of the world that many critics accuse JAY-Z of mindlessly glamorizing. The lyrics come down on the side of drug dealing, finally, as a non-thinking enterprise. “Ain’t a whole lot of brain to that,” he says, concluding that the decision to leave behind the violent, communally debilitating life of the drug dealer is an easy one. “[W]hy risk myself, I just write it in rhymes.” Or more to the point: “This unstable way of living just had to stop.”

  “Kingdom Come,” the title track from JAY-Z’s 2006 comeback album—he briefly retired in 2003 to become CEO of Def Jam after releasing The Black Album—offers a paradigm of intelligence as a desirable good that greatly serves an audience composed of hustlers.

  And I’m so evolved I’m so involved

  I’m showing growth, I’m so in charge

  …

  I’m so indebted, I should have been deaded

  Selling blow in the park, this I know in my heart

  Now I’m so enlightened I might glow in the dark.

  Traditional notions of public intellectual work usually root knowledge in the ivory towers of the university. The spread of knowledge is then traced into the busy lives of everyday folk who normally can’t get to the learning the academy so viciously polices. In a way, JAY-Z has reversed this trajectory. His artistic work has done what some of our most important academic work only aspires to achieve. He speaks to those in the underground economies, and they hear him. In fact, after his retirement, he heard the chorus of pleas for him to return to form.

  I hear “hurry up Hov” when I’m out in the public

  Cause niggas like: “but you love it;
you be it, you’re of it

  “You breathe it, we need it; bring it back to the hustlas.”

  Princeton professor Imani Perry, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, has reflected on what the term “public” has to do with the phrase “public intellectual.” For Perry, thinkers like writer and former NAACP head James Weldon Johnson and author and sociologist Anna Julia Cooper set the mark for what we should expect from public thinkers who ideally “desire to contribute in diverse ways.” Perry says that there “is so much work to be done, particularly in communities of color, on a wide range of issues, including educational outcomes, imprisonment, nutrition, political representation, unemployment.” The work of public thinkers can certainly help solve many of these problems.

  JAY-Z has checked marks in many of these categories: he established the Shawn Carter Scholarship for the formerly incarcerated and for disadvantaged youth who want to go to college; helped to form an organization to promote criminal justice reform; became a vocal advocate for bail reform; produced documentaries that address the tragic deaths of Kalief Browder and Trayvon Martin; visibly supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at different times in their runs for the Oval Office; and used his social media platforms and other outlets to promote a healthy lifestyle to his followers, which he backed up with an investment of a million dollars in a black-owned vegan cookie company. There are, too, his New York Times opinion pieces on social and criminal justice issues, his financial contributions to 9/11 victims and Hurricane Katrina survivors, his aid to black folk in need of legal support for police brutality and free speech cases, his paying the taxes of rap superstars Lil Wayne and Meek Mill and putting up money to bail out members of the Movement for Black Lives. I will explore at length in the next chapter his ideas about social change, racial injustice, and politics. But it is clear, both on record and beyond the sound booth, that Jay has solidified his status as a thinker and artist. His ideas about the underground, education, politics, and society have been translated into practical action and have influenced millions to think about important issues.

  * * *

  In “Hola Hovito,” on his outstanding 2001 album The Blueprint, JAY-Z boldly claims that he “rhyme[s] sicker than every rhyme-spitter.” Literary critics would argue that that’s a clear case of hyperbole, a rhetorical means to accent the truth of his artistic superiority. Poetic principle in service of professional self-promotion. What can’t be argued is that JAY-Z’s lyrics exult in the lively and luxurious use of such poetic devices. It may be his promiscuous rendezvous with the figurative that makes him the “sickest” rhyme spitter of all time. But hyperbole is only the top layer of this particular lyric. The reconfiguration of “sick” as a metaphorical superlative has important roots in the culture. Rap music and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are frequently spiced with ample doses of contronym, a literary mark of playful duality where a two-faced term can suggest its polar opposite in the right context. Consider Run-DMC’s great line, “Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.” Within the lexical universe of hip hop, “sick” borrows its most useful double from one of the culture’s classic contronyms: “ill.” Contronymic terms in hip hop tend toward the superlative spectrum of meaning.

  The relentless quest for language that adequately describes what black folk experience fuels the refiguring of the negative as the positive. Hence there is a moral meaning attached to the use of language in black life. Making it plain that speech has ethical consequences helps to filter a certain set of experiences through the prism of hip hop lyrics. A useful analogy can be made between rapping and preaching. Rappers can be conceived as evangelists who promote the idea that something can come from nothing and that negative circumstances might produce positive outcomes. Theology and sociology nicely combine. Life in the hood can be ill—that is, sick—undoubtedly in a negative way, but sick, too, in the superlative sense conjured in the contronymic figuration of the word. JAY-Z makes a compelling claim to be the sickest ever “rhyme-spitter,” even though every generation sends formidable rappers to the microphone. And even though most rhymes are more spoken than spit. But that might lead us down a literary rabbit hole where we debate whether metaphor or metonym best suits the case.

  “Guns & Roses,” the song, not the iconic rock group of the same name, is one of JAY-Z’s most intriguing collaborations. “Guns & Roses” was produced in 2002 by the late, great rapper Heavy D. There are vocal and guitar contributions from Lenny Kravitz, whose rock-tinged licks underscore lyrics that wrestle with the violence and bliss that shape the ups and downs of hustling and rap music. As usual Jay proclaims his artistic greatness.

  The Michael Corleone of the microphone

  The Michelangelo of flow, I paint pictures with poems.

  Allusions matter, like those to Italian icons of American pop culture and the High Renaissance, and I’ll get to them soon. But the punch line, “I paint pictures with poems,” is as important an analogy as Jay has ever articulated. In one line, he evokes his career-long allusions to Warhol, Picasso, and Michelangelo, his direct engagement with museum culture, and his affinity and affection for Jean-Michel Basquiat. JAY-Z does not write his rhymes in a traditional sense—and yes, more on that later, too—so it may be more accurate to argue that he crafts his images through words. This is more than poetic imagery; it harkens back to the early-twentieth-century poetic movement known as Imagism. That movement featured giants like Ezra Pound and James Joyce and a call for precise, concrete images drawn from common speech, rhythmic inventiveness, and unlimited topics of engagement, all meant to forge clear expression. It can be argued that the best rap artists embrace the Poundian and Joycean imperatives, but none more, or better, than JAY-Z.

  Jay’s sublime attraction to poetic and literary devices has been fed by thousands of hours of exercising his craft. That befits his admiration for Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized the notion that mastery is achieved with at least ten thousand hours of practice. Although he told Oprah in O magazine in 2009 that English was his favorite subject in high school, and that Homer’s The Odyssey left him feeling dreamy about life partnerships and the concept of returning home, Jay has had little formal training in the craft of writing poetry. His practice, still, has almost always been intentional, a reference to another of his favorite books that explores the spiritual dimensions of intentional living, Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul. That practice began on the street corners of Brooklyn, New York. In a hidden track on The Blueprint album, JAY-Z extends the analogy of lyrically working out on “Breathe Easy (Lyrical Exercise).” The track opens in medias res with an interview snippet where Jay describes his writing process. While standing on the corner, dealing crack, Jay would craft and rehearse his rhymes in his mind until he had both perfected and memorized them. “Breathe Easy” bobs and weaves seamlessly through at least three forms of exercise, including jogging, sparring, and weightlifting. There are verses but no real hook except for the extended analogy itself. Jay is rapping about the exercise of rapping using the language of exercise itself. As he brags on the track, he’s in great shape.

  Braggadocio is the pervasive ethos of JAY-Z’s music. If the repetition of a statement or a concept makes it a perceived reality, then Jay has consistently reminded us of how real his greatness is. Given the accumulation of lyrical repetition at work in JAY-Z’s boasting about his gifts, the simplest lines at times deliver the most powerful figurative effects. Take his line “flyer than a piece of paper bearin’ my name” from “Public Service Announcement.” Paper fliers are paper advertisements that are widely distributed by mail, posted in public places, or passed on to individuals. They have an important place in the history of hip hop. In fact, hip hop fliers are enshrined in the Harvard Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, the Cornell University Hip Hop Collection, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. They are concrete, well, metaphorically at least, and if not concrete, then material representations of the culture.

  The concept of
the flier in hip hop flies effortlessly in and through this one line. The flier is an example of an image carefully stamped in a lyric that represents JAY-Z’s artistic signature. A throwaway line becomes a classic, much the same way that a flier to be thrown away becomes a hip hop staple. (Of course most fliers were single-page advertisements without need of a staple, except to pin them to a tree or billboard, just as Jay’s line helped to pin down the performance of “Public Service Announcement.”)

  But there is more. Flight in African American culture has deep conceptual resonance. There are historical aspirations to flee bondage and to imagine being able to fly away from captivity. The modern notion of being or looking “fly” is all about style and sartorial excellence. Of course, when Jay suggests that he is flyer than a flier, a nifty homophone where the words sound the same but have different meanings, he breaks and enters into their homophonic connection to gain figurative access to the wealth of their suggestive meanings. (He also plays on the multiple meanings of the term on 2006’s “Beach Chair,” where he says, “Son said: ‘Hov’, how you get so fly?’ / I said: ‘From not being afraid to fall out the sky.’”) It is at least a triple entendre embedded in braggadocio that is committed to the poetic principles of Imagism while paying homage to a key artifact of hip hop’s material culture.