On Jay-Z’s birthday, revisit Kelefa Sanneh on the rap star’s style. The conversational tics in his lyrics create a sense of intimacy, Sanneh writes, which is undermined by a chilly sensibility and an aversion to sentiment.
Beanie Sigel says that meeting Jay-Z was like meeting the perfect hustler.Earlier this year, VH1, the music-video channel, broadcast a television series called “Bands on the Run.” Four rock groups were sent on tour, competing to see which one could sell the most merchandise; the winner would get a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of new equipment, fifty thousand dollars in cash, a VH1-financed video, and a showcase concert with industry executives.
I met Jay-Z for the first time this spring, in Los Angeles. He was in town for the Soul Train Music Awards , and I spent a day watching him rehearse and shop for sneakers at a nearby mall. There was a constant procession of well-wishers and autograph-seekers, and he greeted most of them wordlessly, with faint smiles and loose handclasps. Jay-Z is not flamboyant in the way that rappers are expected to be flamboyant.
“Reasonable Doubt” sold more than half a million copies, but in order to cross over to the pop audience Jay-Z needed catchier tunes. Rap songs are a combination of rhyming and “beats”—heavily rhythmic tracks built from synthetic sounds, live instrumental music, and samples of other songs. In 1997, Jay-Z tried to find a more beat-driven sound; the result was a disappointing album called “In My Lifetime, Vol.
In the beginning, hip-hop wasn’t “about” anything at all: it was invented not by rappers but by disk jockeys. In 1973, a Jamaican immigrant in the Bronx who called himself DJ Kool Herc popularized the art of manipulating two turntables at once, so he could repeat his favorite drum patterns over and over. The jumpy music that resulted was given the name hip-hop. D.j.s who performed regularly in parks or clubs or roller rinks began hiring m.c.
The Notorious B.I.G. was a protégé of Sean Combs, a music executive who moonlighted as a rapper under the name Puff Daddy. In the summer of 1997, Combs initiated hip-hop’s big-money boom with a eulogy for Biggie called “I’ll Be Missing You,” in which he rapped over “Every Breath You Take,” the eighties chestnut by the Police.
To a casual listener, it may not be immediately obvious what makes one rapper better than another. But, like the generation of fans who dissected Bob Dylan’s lyrics and debated the merits of various bootleg recordings, rap fans pore over arcana in magazines and squabble about literary prowess online. On one hip-hop Web site, visitors recently debated “What is the hottest metaphor or simile ever written?” From the beginning, Jay-Z was admired for the quality of his verse.
“D’evils” is a song about money and power, and it describes a world in which ambition is the root of all evil , a world where the criminal ethic—“We all tryna win”—sounds a lot like a capitalist code. In the second verse, we find a young hustler kidnapping a young mother, desperate to locate her lover, who has, it seems, betrayed him in a business deal.
“When everybody else was doing gold,” Jay-Z says, “I was, like, ‘I want something platinum.’ And then seeing the whole world switch—the whole world, you know what I’m saying? For a kid from Marcy? No one can take that away from me.” In hip-hop, achievement comes down to style: life style, musical style, rhyme style. Jay-Z has moved out of the Marcy projects and into a penthouse apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey , which has a view of the Manhattan skyline and a private screening room.
It was not a day of high legal drama. The court date was a mere formality—a request for a postponement. There were only half a dozen other people in the courtroom; no reporters, no fans. Crack topic: back block it, thirty-one long blacktop it, you can’t stop it, Gat top it, black Mack, black Glock it, blast rocket, sit your faggot-ass on your back pocket.
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