JAY-Z Read online

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  As a writer, I find it astonishing that JAY-Z does not write down his lyrics. He does not impress paper with ink in order to impress his hearers with his complex rhymes. He does not so much as scribble his thoughts on paper or type them on any surface or screen. Given the huge quantity and high quality of his oeuvre, his work is all the more remarkable. Orality is a defining feature of black culture. The oral tradition of crafting and transmitting African American folktales was inherited by enslaved Africans from their continental forebearers. These oral stories were designed to make sense of the brutal conditions foisted on black souls in the New World during the long siege of transatlantic slavery. Folktales from the African oral tradition seeped into the fabric of black expression and performance. One popular example, “The People Who Could Fly,” captures the incredible story of mass suicide by Africans in bondage. The story is transformed into a celebration of resistance and liberation in the face of racial violence and chattel slavery. There is little doubt that hip hop culture creatively extends the moral instincts of the oral tradition. As a hip hop writer, JAY-Z epitomizes black orality in the twenty-first century.

  But Jay doesn’t primarily rap about slavery. His most profound contributions to the African American oral tradition are more like hustler turned author Iceberg Slim than novelist Charles Chesnutt. (“Where’s Iceberg Slim he was the coldest cat?” say those asking JAY-Z to come out of retirement on “Kingdom Come.”) Instead Jay has made high art of low culture. Some of his most salient contributions to the African American oral tradition are gritty and at times violent narratives that portray underground economies in the waning years of the twentieth century. “Friend or Foe,” from 1996’s Reasonable Doubt, and 1998’s “Friend or Foe ’98,” from In My Lifetime, Volume 1, are two classic examples of this form.

  Neither of these are best described as songs. “Friend or Foe” has a run time of about 1:50 and “Friend or Foe ’98” clocks in at just over two minutes. Neither track has any semblance of a hook. Both performances in tandem complete the story of how Jay’s narrator first warns and then disposes of his would-be competition in the drug game. The style of the lyrics is conversational and flippant, downplaying the sort of cutthroat approaches to the turf wars that plague illegal drug dealing. The setting is “out-of-state,” and in “Friend or Foe,” with piercing staccato horns blowing away, Jay’s narrator advises his opponent to never “ever-ever-ever-ever-ever-ever come around here no mo’.”

  In “Friend or Foe ’98,” fretful guitars dominate the soundscape as his competition returns with schemes to murder Jay’s narrator. His opponent is foiled, and Jay’s narrator kills him, and in the process of pulling the trigger, sends salutations and “ice cubes” to his recently departed friend, Biggie Smalls. The “Friend or Foe” tag team was not designed for radio airplay. The songs don’t have, nor do they require, music videos. Each is its own cinematic glimpse into the life of a New York drug dealer hustling in Virginia, or elsewhere in the South, only to find that some other Northeastern hustler has the same idea of making easy money where the demand is high, law enforcement is soft, and competition is limited.

  Jay’s vocal performance, particularly on the original “Friend or Foe,” sounds effortless. The recording plays more like a freestyle than a premeditated “written” set of rhymes. This is both intentional and a consequence of Jay’s artistic process. The lyrical work sounds unrehearsed and therefore more authentic and, in this sense, more easily absorbed into an established African American oral tradition. But the unrehearsed free-flowing aesthetic of the “Friend or Foe” verses also reflects JAY-Z’s non-writing “writing” process. That process in turn helps to bolster the aesthetic and epic nature of the “Friend or Foe” conflict. The aesthetic requires a demeanor in the narrator that is effortlessly cool but ultimately calculating given the stakes of this illegal “game.” Revisiting the “Friend or Foe” narratives reminds listeners of the prelude to JAY-Z’s “Breathe Easy (Lyrical Exercise),” where he talks specifically about committing lyrics to memory as he navigates urban corners, hustling his illegal product.

  JAY-Z’s lyrical process itself feels a tad illegal, as if his gifts violate some unwritten law, as if not writing words down and using mnemonic tricks should not lead to artistic dominance. JAY-Z’s artistic process forces us to rethink exactly what it means to write, which should be reimagined, at least in his case, as an operation exclusively using the mind.

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  We often consider metaphor to be the figurative tool of choice for MCs and rappers. That is a subtle allusion to the fact that aficionados make a distinction between kinds of rhetorical creativity. MCs master the mic with technical skills and verbal dexterity. Rappers command the mic with political passion or personal zeal. But the art of allusion has quietly become a major component of all great hip hop songs. Allusions thrive as implied references and have always been near the top of Jay’s creative chamber. Much of Jay’s artistic swagger relies on the implications of his proven ability to survive the pitfalls of hustling in America. Thus his body of work regularly alludes to his life as a hustler. This “macro” allusion to his life experiences requires him to tap into the underground world of drug dealing in the belief that his audience shares some measure of the experience with him. And yet from the time of his first release, 1996’s Reasonable Doubt, most of Jay’s audience wasn’t standing on urban corners “slinging” crack rocks. But something artistically transformative occurred. Jay’s allusions to hustling assumed an audience that understood the experiences he detailed in his lyrics. There was an allusive connection between an ex-hustler rapping about hustling and his audience of hustlers. That allusive connection in turn provided all of Jay’s listeners an authentic sense of the experiences he alluded to in order to create the music in the first place.

  Allusions often require a lyrical leap of faith that the person, figure, text, art, or piece of literature the poet suggests can be easily discerned by her audience. That discernment is driven by the shared experiences that underwrite the figurative force of allusions. After Biggie’s untimely death, Jay repeatedly cited his fallen friend on record. Each citation of Biggie is a self-contained allusion to him. These allusions—and Jay’s recurring citation of Biggie’s lyrics or references to them in various ways—form an ongoing tribute to his comrade and permit Jay’s audience to share the experience with him. In this case it is the experience of loss and the mourning that attends the brutal public murder of an iconic hip hop figure.

  These and other poetic concerns are at play in JAY-Z’s richly allusive “Meet the Parents,” from his 2002 The Blueprint 2 album. In his memoir Decoded, Jay writes that he “never intended ‘Meet the Parents’ to be subtle,” and yet the subtleties of this track abound. “Meet the Parents” has a powerful effect for first-time listeners that will be ruined by my exposition. The title “Meet the Parents” alludes to the great Ben Stiller movies of the same name. (As a sixty-year-old black man, I harken back as well to the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which a black physician, played by acting idol Sidney Poitier, meets for the first time his white fiancée’s liberal parents, played by screen legends Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, who have no idea in advance of his race.) Stiller’s 2000 film Meet the Parents, directed by Jay Roach, and also starring Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner, was a remake of a 1992 film of the same name directed by Greg Glienna. Stiller’s Meet the Parents was popular enough to inspire two sequels, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, and two television shows, the situation comedy In-Laws and the reality-television show Meet My Folks, both of which debuted in 2002. There’s no doubt that Stiller’s Meet the Parents was an apt allusion that easily worked in the collective consciousness of JAY-Z’s listeners. The film humorously details a time-honored tradition of life partners meeting each other’s families. Stiller’s version of this tradition stews in the anxiety that these situations often provoke. It is pure comedy. Jay’s “Meet the Parents” is decidedly darker, an epic tragedy.<
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  JAY-Z’s “Meet the Parents” exposes without effort the unspoken white and class privileges that fuel Meet the Parents. In the film, two upper-middle-class families come together before the upcoming nuptials of Greg Focker (played by Ben Stiller) and Pam Byrnes (played by Teri Polo). The film highlights the cultural differences between the Byrneses, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family, and the Fockers, a white American Jewish family. “Meet the Parents” is about a monumental inner-city one-night stand between two characters named Isis and Mike. Their brief union produced the unnamed protagonist of JAY-Z’s tale. Isis loves Mike for all the wrong reasons.

  Mike was the hard head from around the way

  That she wanted all her life, shit, she wanted all the hype.

  Mike immediately denies his paternity and absolves himself of any fatherly responsibility. “If that was my son, he would look much different,” he says. Mike disconnects from his son and from Isis. The decision by the father to not claim or care for his son is one with which JAY-Z personally identifies, since his father left home when Jay was eleven years old. It was a tragic and defining moment for the young Shawn Carter. As an internationally renowned artist, Jay takes a moment to allude to his pain and to underscore the pain of black fathers who abandon their kids.

  But “Meet the Parents” functions lyrically as a composite of interlocking allusions. More tragedy looms for Isis, Mike, and their unnamed son. Fourteen years go by in “Meet the Parents” without Mike and Isis speaking and without Mike talking to his son. In a Shakespearean twist of events, Mike confronts a young hustler on the urban strip where he normally hustles. He tells the younger man to move along, and the younger man bristles. They face off and draw weapons on each other, each armed with a snub-nose thirty-eight pistol. The younger man hesitates because he sees a glimmer of himself in the older man’s face. That bit of hesitation proves to be deadly as the older man fires six shots, killing the younger man. Jay’s narrator provides the costly moral lesson as the song concludes.

  Six shots into his kin out of the gun

  Niggas, be a father, you killin’ your sons

  Jay repeats the lines for emphasis and chilling effect.

  Black fatherlessness has often been prompted by draconian public policies like unjust prison sentencing and counterproductive housing rules. It has also been overblown by media coverage and made political fodder for right-wing and liberal interests. But the allusion to Meet the Parents is a powerful reminder that the challenges of parenting and absenteeism in African American communities are real. “Meet the Parents” may not be so subtle in its jarring contrast of black fatherlessness and the easy paternal privilege of the film it alludes to. But the figure of Isis demands a deeper reading as we grapple with black rituals of mourning. After seeing her son’s dead body in the morgue, Isis’s

  addiction grew, prescription drugs, sippin’ brew

  Angel dust, dipped in WOO!

  She is as tragic a figure as either of the men who draw on each other in the song. In too many painful ways, Isis embodies the modern black mother in mourning. We know these mothers, Sybrina Fulton, Leslie McSpadden, and Lucy McBath among them. They are women who are forced into a sorority of suffering to publicly mourn children lost to senseless violence by the police or by black folk. It is telling that Isis is the name of the Egyptian goddess of mourning. When her husband Osiris is killed by her brother Seth, her mourning becomes mythic and divine. With her divine magical prowess, she reassembles her husband’s body and brings him briefly back to life. But ultimately Osiris cannot remain among the living and becomes the king of the dead. This establishes Isis as the goddess of mourning and the queen of the dead. The myth of Isis is a family affair in Egyptian lore, and JAY-Z taps into that timeless mythology, connecting it to the challenges that we face in contemporary urban and black communities. “Meet the Parents” is a mythic tribute of its own. It is a warning to its listeners of the perilous outcomes of forsaken parenting, and an indelible paean to those who struggle to survive the neighbor-to-neighbor, father-to-son, and brother-to-brother violence that plagues our communities.

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  It is ironic that Jay’s conscientious rebuke to intramural black violence came in the recent aftermath of his epic row with Nas. By every measure the lyrical war on and off record between Shawn Carter and Nasir Jones was the best “beef” in hip hop history. Their government names are interchangeable with their rap monikers here—and only here—given the personal nature of aspects of their pugilistic exchange. By the time most of us started to pay attention to the Nas and Jay conflict, there was already a greater war unfolding. Shots had already been fired when JAY-Z took the stage at Summer Jam 2001 and teased the world with the first bars of “Takeover.” Summer Jam is the annual hip hop summer festival sponsored since 1994 by New York–based radio station Hot 97. That year it took place in Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum.

  Many followers of the New York rhyme scene had been paying attention since Nas bragged that a Lexus with television sets in it was the “minimum” luxury car one should enjoy, a direct jab at JAY-Z’s vehicle choice in 1996. Some say the beef predated this slight, to when Nas failed to show up for the “Dead Presidents II” studio session for JAY-Z’s debut album, Reasonable Doubt. (To outsiders these jabs and offenses feel light; their heaviness is determined by how they signify in a syntax of insult and a grammar of grievance driven by turf, tone, and testosterone.) Ironically Nas’s physical absence from the recording session turned into his sampled presence on the song. Producer Ski Beatz interpolated Nas’s vocals from “The World Is Yours” into “Dead Presidents II.” That song in turn became one of JAY-Z’s signature recordings.

  JAY-Z’s opening salvo in this battle was a boast of membership in rap’s pantheon. On 1997’s “Where I’m From,” he contends that hip hop partisans

  argue all day about

  Who’s the best MCs—Biggie, Jay-Z, or Nas.

  Jay was then a young upstart with only one record to his credit. Claiming comparable status to Nas and Biggie may have seemed premature. But these lines rang true. True enough, Reasonable Doubt only got its just due after JAY-Z gained prominence, even if some fans spotted its lyrical pedigree from the start. But discussions about JAY-Z’s capabilities as an MC were already drawing “G.O.A.T.” (Greatest Of All Time) comparisons.

  Jay began this beef in earnest at Summer Jam when he declared, “Ask Nas, he don’t want it with Hov. NO!” That line got tongues wagging all over the hip hop universe. Consider the context. The first thirty bars or so of the “Takeover” are directed at Queens hip hop duo Mobb Deep, composed of rappers Havoc and Prodigy.

  I don’t care if you Mobb Deep, I hold triggers to crews

  You little fuck, I got money stacks bigger than you

  When I was pushin’ weight back in ’88

  You was a ballerina, I got the pictures, I seen ya

  Then you dropped “Shook Ones,” switched your demeanor

  Well, we don’t believe you, you need more people.

  It was a spot-on verbal tirade that challenged the group’s hood bona fides because of Jay’s withering disbelief in their claims of toughness. It left the authors of “Shook Ones” a bit shaken themselves. Although Jay claimed, “I got the pictures, I seen ya,” the actual photos that Jay flashed on the screen at Summer Jam showed Prodigy in a Thriller-era Michael Jackson outfit, with a multiple-zippered jacket, white socks, and black loafers. The photos were snapped by Prodigy’s grandmother as he performed as a boy for her dance studio’s annual recital at a New York concert hall. Interestingly, at the same Summer Jam concert where he dissed Prodigy and Nas, Jay brought out Michael Jackson in a spectacular cameo appearance, thus undercutting his diss of Prodigy and signifying that he actually embraced Jackson.

  The diss of Prodigy was an instance of Jay playing the dozens, a game with long roots in black culture where insults are exchanged in a ritual verbal battle between contestants. Prodigy thought the display of the photos was fu
nny and took no offense. He told me as much when we had a public conversation about his autobiography, My Infamous Life, six years before his death in 2017. He also said he had encountered Jay outside a New York restaurant a few months after the Summer Jam incident. Jay extended a brotherly handshake and claimed they had no beef and that it was just music. As we will see below, that is consistent with Jay’s views about most rap beefs.

  For Jay to tag Nas at the end of that blistering attack was the equivalent of laying down the gauntlet and then stomping it into the ground. Or, to shift metaphors, the beef between them had been fileted and seasoned and now it was ready to be sautéed.

  Hot 97’s Summer Jam has been a perennial platform for the hottest hip hop artists and the most salacious hip hop conflicts. But after that 2001 moment, I could not, in good conscience, join those who breathlessly awaited the next entry in what would be hip hop’s greatest battle. I was at the time contemplating the lyrical life of Tupac. I was still in deep mourning for both Tupac and Biggie, two lyrical souls locked in mortal conflict. How could hip hop audiences gear up for another battle between hip hop legends? I knew that when titans battle, their minions go to war as well. Unless you have been to the Queensbridge Houses or the Marcy Projects, you might not be able to fully understand the grip of desperation that residential poverty has on its victims. You might not grasp how the lyrics from a champion of your hood might galvanize forces against his opponent’s hood in ways that lead to unreported collateral damage. These rap battles are too often ratcheted up by media frenzy.

  And so, for the “Takeover,” and later, with Nas’s response “Ether,” I couldn’t actually enjoy the artistry. I was unable to think of these exchanges as two verbal virtuosos trading well-organized modern versions of the dozens. For me, these were two mythological brothers at war with each other and hip hop culture hung in the balance. Hip hop could not survive a war between JAY-Z and Nas that moved off the records and into the streets. It was simply too soon.