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In other words, The Black Album is a record that is all things to all people which, I might add, doesn’t necessarily have to be seen as such a negative quality.
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However, it is in this light that if The Black Album is indeed Jay’s final record, he is calling it quits at the top of his artistic powers, having finally dropped a consistent album that strikes the perfect balance between the business man and the backpacker. While 2001’s The Blueprint was a conservative masterful mix of soul-stirring beats and Jay’s own brand of agile confessional rhymes and pugilistic hubris it’s follow-up, the unexplainably titled, Blueprint 2, was a sprawling, guest-filled, double album which despite possessing a number of inspired moments, felt more like a rushed attempt at throwing the clubs some new “bangers”, and capitalizing off it’s predecessor’s ingenuity. Given that hip-hop, in general, is a genre unfortunately littered with too many disposable heroes (anyone remember Fabolous? where might Chingy be in five years?), and albums which seem to be created more as products than as art, Jay-Z has always had a self-consciously difficult time on wax reconciling the hustler in him, with the auteur.įor evidence of this idea, one needs only to glance back on the reactionary pair of records that precede The Black Album. ”Ībout midway through Jay-Z’s highly anticipated, self-proclaimed swan song, The Black Album, Jay confesses on the aptly-titled, Eminem produced, “Moment of Clarity”, that, “If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be, lyrically Talib Kweli.” To longtime fans of Jay’s music, this admission comes as somewhat of a refreshing revelation to hear from the man’s own lips. So on that note, I’m leaving after this song.
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And forgive the pun, but there’s still no real blueprint for him: Past 50, a billionaire, married with children-not only capable of artistic growth (as he proved so eloquently on 2017’s 4:44), but also willing to embrace it.“They say they never really miss you till your dead or your gone. Even as he ascended to the executive suite-a move that not only rechristened rappers as the vertically integrated businessmen they already were, but also opened up new paths for black artists navigating corporate America-he remained stoic, a little ruthless, playful about a past that most might not have come back from.Īdd to it a dexterity on the mic-not to mention a deep, intuitive love for language-that helped bring rap out of the yes-yes-y’all era and into another in which MCs functioned as American griots, chroniclers of the black American experience whose chains flashed bright but whose words flashed even brighter. Jay-Z (born in 1969) didn’t romanticize the streets (“Recruited lieutenants with ludicrous dreams of gettin’ cream/‘Let’s do this,’ it gets tedious”), but he never claimed remorse for them either. By the time he released 1996’s Reasonable Doubt, he said he was the oldest 26-year-old you’d ever want to meet.
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His childhood was violent: He started selling crack in his early teens and later quipped that getting a gun in Bed-Stuy was easier than getting public assistance. Growing up in central Brooklyn (“I’m from Marcy Houses, where the boys die by the thousand”), Shawn Carter wrote rhymes everywhere: standing at a streetlight, on the backs of brown-paper bags, banging out beats on his windowsill to find the rhythm.