JAY-Z Read online

  Even ardent fans are weary of hardcore artists flashing receipts for a cartoonish masculinity that few can afford to buy. Such flagrantly archaic views of manhood beg a fundamental question: Can that many “bitches” have riled that many “niggas” in the Maybach on the way to the club to pop collars and bottles before having empty sex and killing foes who offend their honor? It’s easy to lose count, and accountability, of the bodies. Drake deserves high praise for breaking the thug logjam in hip hop and pushing past brute machismo to embrace masculine vulnerability. That may be the shining core of Drake hate: he amplifies his emotions as eloquently as he speaks his mind. Too many rap artists carry their feelings like a concealed weapon while Drake shoots from the left side of his chest right into the nearest microphone.

  “The game needed life, I put my heart in it,” Drake raps on “The Resistance,” lamenting on the song’s hook how the success he pined for now keeps him from loved ones: “What am I afraid of? This is supposed to be what dreams are made of.” On “Own It,” Drake reverses gender roles and pleads for intimacy: instead of sex, he wants to “make love / Next time we talk, I don’t wanna just talk, I wanna trust.” On the infectious mid-tempo stepper “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” rumored to be about on-again, off-again flame Rihanna, Drake confesses, “I can’t get over you / You left your mark on me.” Drake in these songs and in much of his oeuvre violates a cardinal rule in hip hop: when it comes to women, never let them see you fret.

  Drake’s emotional transparency isn’t all that has sparked ire; his rhymes are often awash in melodies that cascade from a pleasant tenor singing voice, a feat that supposedly angers rap gods, who frown on the mingling of hip hop and rhythm and blues. Other great artists like Lauryn Hill and CeeLo Green have brilliantly rapped and sung on their respective releases. But no one in rap has ever done so as effectively as Drake, giving fresh definition to b-boy, or break-boy. He not only sings his own hooks, and sings his own songs, but breaks into song in the middle of a rap, and vice versa. Or he alternates between rapping and singing in the same line, or sometimes in the same phrase, thus breaking down the barrier between acts of speech and song and making quite nervous those intent on keeping them discrete enterprises. Drake’s sonic hybridity, his fusion of speech and song, mirrors his hybridity of race and place as an artist with a white mother from Canada and a black father from the United States.

  The alienation from Drake by emotionally immature men has been matched by a surprisingly negative female reaction to the crooner-rapper. To be sure, this isn’t a scientific survey, but one drawn from anecdotes, and my evidence was collected in an informal poll of women across the country (clearly not the thousands of screaming ladies I see at Drake’s concerts) who are stumped by my affection for the self-described “light-skinned Keith Sweat,” and who find Drake intolerably self-reflective, melancholy, and emotional. It is difficult to hear such critiques when the urban version of the strong, silent type offers little comfort or support to women. That type often appears to be Hercules in sagging pants with low emotional intelligence.

  The effort of many women to awaken men to the emotional currents around them suggests that such “sensitivity” is a quality they find desirable. The catty memes of Drake posted by women in social media gibing the artist for his emotional makeup amplify the distorted romantic images and expectations that engulf a generation of women inured to poor treatment by their men. The shame isn’t Drake’s; the shame is that we can’t endorse a black man who isn’t a thug and who wears his heart on his sleeve. On his masterly 4:44 Jay embraced an even more honest and redemptive emotional vulnerability than what has been touted by Drake.

  Although it appears that Drake and Jay are far apart when it comes to visual art, there are signs the fine arts ice between them is melting. There is Drake’s heavy reference to light-magic visual artist James Turrell on his massive 2015 hit “Hotline Bling.” And on Drake’s turn at the mic on rapper Meek Mill’s 2018 “Going Bad” (the result of them resolving their beef to record together), he says, “Yeah, lot of Murakami in the hallway (What?).” (Takashi Murakami is a Japanese contemporary fine arts and commercial media artist who has designed album covers for Kanye West, and who has collaborated with Drake on designer jackets and other fashion items.) While Drake appears to be dipping his toes in the fine arts waters, Jay has clearly been baptized in its healing streams.

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  Art has been historically viewed as too highbrow for the black masses. Art galleries, art exhibitions, and most art museums have largely ignored or refused to cater to black communities starved of images and art that reflect their culture and their spiritual and moral yearnings. Tina Knowles-Lawson, Beyoncé’s mother, saw the value in art as a young woman and filled her home with images of black folk. “When my kids were growing up, it was really important to me that they saw images of African-Americans,” Lawson told Vanity Fair magazine in 2018. “I’m so happy that I did, because both of them are really aware of their culture, and I think a lot of that had to do with looking at those images every day, those strong images.” It is clearly a lesson that her son-in-law Jay has absorbed over the years.

  In fact, the failure of the art world to accommodate black identity and to affirm norms and standards of black beauty inspired JAY-Z in 2011 to conjure a gallery of black and brown female icons worthy of curation:

  I mean Marilyn Monroe, she’s quite nice

  But why all the pretty icons always all white?

  Put some colored girls in the MoMA

  Half these broads ain’t got nothing on Willona

  Don’t make me bring Thelma in it

  Bring Halle, bring Penélope and Salma in it

  Back to my Beyoncés

  You deserve three stacks, word to André

  Call Larry Gagosian, you belong in museums

  To be sure it wasn’t just black females who deserved a place on the museum wall. JAY-Z found a way to insert his black body into the conversation. Officially listed as “A Performance Art Film,” the nearly eleven-minute video for JAY-Z’s 2013 song “Picasso Baby” is an ode to New York’s multicultural landscape. In it, he cites artists and also offers a verbal rebuff to persistent racism and the relentless scrutiny of his iconic status. The song’s video was given cinematic treatment when it debuted on the cable television channel HBO in August 2013. The video was filmed in July 2013 at New York’s Pace Gallery.

  “Picasso Baby” is a visual gallery of Jay’s understanding of how he became the artist he is today. In the last third of the song, and midway through the film, the ebullient production of “Picasso Baby” breaks down to a grittier affair with guitar riffs and a throwback backbeat. Here the song, and JAY-Z’s performance of it before a live audience, shifts into its hardest “self.” Up until this point, “Picasso Baby” is the usual aspirational and materialistic fare with artistic shout-outs and clever references to “fine” art and artists: Picasso, Mona Lisa, marble floors, gold ceilings, MoMA, Warhol, Art Basel, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Met. And of course there is a reference to Jean-Michel Basquiat, the gifted black neo-expressionist artist whose work inspired JAY-Z as it probed “suggestive dichotomies” like wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, inner perception versus outer experience. But once the break intervenes, both the song and the film assume a more intense, and purposeful, tone.

  Now Jay motions the surrounding crowd closer to him. The invitation suggests that proximity might enhance the experience as the artist delves into a deeper form of expression. In the earlier portion of the performance Jay is cordoned off in the center of the gallery, as if he is a work of art himself. His performance art film pays direct homage to the legendary Marina Abramović, the Serbian-born sensation who has shaken and shaped the art world with her fearless, and at times violent, performance art pieces. Abramović’s 2010 “The Artist Is Present” is a masterly show of endurance and artistic exploration built on Abramović’s commitment to sit silently for over 700 hours and look into the ey
es of those who gaze upon her performance. Abramović’s body of work quite literally, limb by limb, her flesh as the canvas, forms an improbable bridge between her status in the art world, and JAY-Z’s extraordinary journey from the Marcy Projects to the heights of the world of art. It all culminated, in a way, with JAY-Z’s six-hour performance art piece in the Chelsea Pace Gallery in July 2013, which was distilled to his eleven-minute video. Abramović’s willingness to put her body on the line is not something with which JAY-Z was unfamiliar. He did so himself, repeatedly, willingly, hustling on the dangerous streets in pursuit of material gain. But that was JAY-Z the blight hustler. JAY-Z the bright hustler, the artist, now uses those experiences to enjoy a measure of success he could scarcely have begun to imagine when he was dealing drugs on the block.

  But the break in the film, and in the song, is a cue to take us back to that JAY-Z, and to situate this performance art film in the annals of the fine art forms that embrace and embody sacrifice. Attacks from the media, disgruntled fans, annoying paparazzi, and run-ins with the law form the underside of success and fame. It is a theme that regularly recurs in Jay’s body of work. In frustration JAY-Z glares into the camera for full effect. “I put down the cans and they ran amok,” he nearly screams—and here cans are at least a triple entendre of spray paint cans for graffiti, pistols, and headphones—as he pantomimes shooting his enemies with a gun in each hand. His next lines gesture toward the visceral damage that bullets cause the human body, linking him to the film’s Serbian muse and to his not-so-distant past as a drug dealer. There’s more shooting before this verse concludes as Jay recalls his “cans” metaphor to slip in another allusion to Basquiat, claiming that he will “spray everything like SAMO”—the graffiti duo Basquiat was a part of that scrawled esoteric epigrams all over Lower East Side Manhattan buildings in the late seventies. Although it is not the final line, Jay’s reminder, “Don’t forget, America, this how you made me,” punctuates the song and the performance in a way that only an underprivileged son of urban America could. It puts a period on a performance art piece in one of the most elite artistic spaces in the world.

  The “Picasso Baby” performance art film reflects JAY-Z’s sustained engagement with fine art. In his “Blue Magic” video from 2007, Jay raps in front of a painting by Takashi Murakami (yes, the same artist Drake has teamed with) and spin-art skull paintings by British artist, collector, and entrepreneur Damien Hirst. In his 2008 Glastonbury music festival performance, Jay rapped before a visual backdrop that featured Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull entitled “For the Love of God.” A couple of years later a replica of the skull was made and can be seen throughout Jay’s 2010 video for his song “On to the Next One.” (Although controversy has dogged Hirst’s art since 1999 with charges of plagiarism, his preoccupation with death resonates with elements of hip hop culture that address carnage, suffering, and mortality.) In his verse on Rick Ross’s 2008 song “Maybach Music,” Jay shows how his artistic register has expanded.

  The curtains are drawn perfectly like a Picasso, Rembrandts and Rothkos

  I’m a major player, 40/40’s in Vegas at the Palazzo.

  It’s the same year he was spotted with Beyoncé attending the international contemporary art fair Art Basel Miami Beach, and a year before he told the Mirror that he owned pieces by Hirst and Richard Prince. In 2009, Jay also compared himself to a Warhol painting on “Already Home”:

  I’m in The Hall already, on the wall already

  I’m a work of art, I’m a Warhol already.

  It’s the same year he bragged on “Off That” that he was “In my TriBeCa loft / With my highbrow art and my high yellow broad.”

  In 2011, on “Who Gon Stop Me,” a duet with Kanye, Jay added the Museum of Modern Art to his list of artistic allusions.

  Pablo Picasso, Rothkos, Rilkes

  Graduated to the MoMA

  And I did all of this without a diploma.

  The cover art for his 2011 memoir, Decoded, was designed by graphic artist Rodrigo Corral and features a gold-embossed version of Andy Warhol’s “Rorschach.” In his classic 2006 collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, “Pressure,” on Fiasco’s debut album, Jay name-checks Warhol.

  If the war calls for Warhols

  Hope you got enough space on your hall’s walls.

  On “Ain’t I,” a track that was likely recorded as early as 2006 but wasn’t released until 2008 on DJ Clue?’s Desert Storm Radio Volume 8 mixtape, Jay raps that

  I got Warhols on my hall’s wall

  I got Basquiats in the lobby of my spot

  His affinity for Warhol is understandable: Warhol reshaped the gateways to the fine arts world by unapologetically embracing a pop art aesthetic and relentlessly sampling and remaking popular culture as fine art, aesthetic features that made him interesting and inspiring for the young Jean-Michel Basquiat.

  While the fine arts captured Jay’s attention, he was also captivated by popular art in elite settings. If we had to choose one single that catapulted JAY-Z from stardom to superstardom it would have to be “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” from his third album, Vol. 2, released in 1998. That album sold over five million copies in the United States. The single was instrumental in propelling that record to five-times-platinum status back when fans still purchased CDs from actual brick-and-mortar music stores. “Hard Knock Life” interpolates a refrain from the song “It’s the Hard Knock Life,” featured in the Broadway musical Annie. A Broadway musical, if not quite fine art, was nevertheless viewed as finer art than hip hop by many of Broadway’s patrons. The sampling of the song was also a nod to Jay’s openness to a variety of art forms and his understanding that common themes of existential struggle unite disparate genres of music. Thus one of his most successful songs, at a critical point in his career, features a sample from a Broadway musical that highlights the plight of poor, socially invisible children. Vol. 2 won the Grammy for Best Rap Album that year. Jay’s song, the sample of the original, the themes of the musical in which the original song was performed, and the acknowledgment from the Recording Academy all form a Warholian narrative, a pastiche of key pop cultural moments.

  And yet, while Warhol is undeniably an artistic touchstone, JAY-Z identifies far more intensely with the Brooklyn-born fine artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In Decoded and elsewhere Jay discusses how Basquiat’s 1982 painting “Charles the First”—featuring the artist’s rendering of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker with textual inscriptions about the god Thor that elevate Parker to mythical stature—inspired his 2010 song “Most Kingz,” produced by DJ Green Lantern and featuring Coldplay front man Chris Martin. For Jay, Basquiat’s “Charles the First” is a visual treatise on the perils and pitfalls of success. “Success is like suicide,” he claims on the track. The track where Martin sings the hook functions as the auditory leitmotif, the spoken complement to Basquiat’s raw textual interventions in the painting: “Most kings get their heads cut off.” Basquiat was likely alluding to the late great Charlie Parker, who, like Basquiat himself, died early from a drug overdose. Like Basquiat, and Jay, Parker contended with a white world that eventually embraced his art even as he continued to face racism. It was tough to survive in such a world, one that drove both Basquiat and Parker to taking drugs, and Jay earlier to selling them.

  Jay doesn’t take his survival lightly. “Most Kingz” gives a litany of those, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and even Pac and Biggie, who achieved fame and died well before their time. His purchase of art, besides its aesthetic, financial, and political value, may possess a compelling existential one, too: it is a way of keeping alive the legacy of black men who blazed the path before him. In 2013, Jay paid $4.5 million to acquire Basquiat’s “Mecca” at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. With the exception of B.I.G., Jay alludes to Basquiat more than any other artist. In a standout line in “Picasso Baby,” he claims:

  It ain’t hard to tell

  I’m the new Jean Michel

  And in some ways, he is a new, longer-
living version of the legendary Basquiat: born nearly a decade apart, both are black prodigies, both became global icons, both fought to have their art taken seriously by the world.

  But the first line, usually overlooked when this verse is cited, is similarly allusive and just as powerful. It’s a quote from the 1994 song “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” from Illmatic, the classic debut album of Nas, another rap genius. It shows how JAY-Z continues to appreciate the art forms that nurtured his own gift. But it shows, too, how Jay reconciles artistically what he has reconciled personally, and that by alluding to one of Nas’s most famous songs, he has found peace and brotherhood with a former rival. And it means something even more important: that, at least rhetorically, perhaps even literally, he kept at least two kings’ heads, Nas’s and his own, from being cut off. That may be one of Jay’s most generous if greatly unappreciated gestures.

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  If Jay has tangled in verse with icons like Nas and Drake, and if he has cited the lives of fallen icons like Basquiat and Parker, King and Malcolm, he has also occasionally explored the appeal and relevance of another iconic figure: the comic book superhero. Indeed, hip hop has a long-standing love affair with superheroes, in part because of their similar quest for social justice. The relationship is also fed by the belief that rappers and superheroes both overcome enormous odds to represent their communities on the largest platforms possible. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that rappers are superheroes for many of the folk in the communities they come from. It makes sense that hip hop artists often turn to comics and superhero genres to make important points about love, the hood, crime, poverty, and, in the case of JAY-Z on Kingdom Come, the music industry itself.

  Kingdom Come takes its title from a popular comic book miniseries of the same name. In DC’s 1996 version of Kingdom Come, traditional superheroes like Superman and Wonder Woman have receded from public life and left the work of world-saving and fighting bad guys to a new breed of hero. In this world, traditional superheroes are out of touch with reality and disconnected from the goings-on in the streets. Therefore, just as JAY-Z did in the music industry, these heroes retire. In their place rises a new hero, named Magog. He is of an utterly different ethical order. For Magog the ends always justify the means; he kills and destroys to save, serve, and protect. The results are disastrous, and the traditional superheroes, especially Wonder Woman, plead for Superman to come out of retirement. Superman finally agrees and comes back to better the dystopic world that Magog has created.