Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this certainly disturbing and also kind of hilarious inquiry, let’s just throw a few ideas out about what kind of rapper Jay-Z is. Well, for one thing, he’s good. He’s got undeniable skill on the mic, dubbed a “New York talker” by somebody in the business in an interview, and is capable of ingenious wordplay. One example would be his opening verse on “Big Pimpin’” which seemed like nothing we’d heard before in terms of unabashed, flashy and high-profile womanizing with a distinct absence of the emotion factor. I’m also partial for that part in “Dirt off Your Shoulders,” which for the record even writing this post I think is a thoroughly great song, with all the “52”’s: “52 cards roll out / I’m through dealin’ now / 52 bars roll out / Now you feel ’em now / 52 cars roll out / Remove ceiling now / 52 broads come out / Now you chillin’”.
Well, look at it this way: he did an album with Kanye. They belong in each other’s company and in the same sentence as each other. Jay-Z’s a yin to his yang: a non-producer, a confrontational, gangster-minded emcee, to Kanye’s humorous, holistic and slightly nerdy approach to making hip-hop music. But they’re both mainstream. They’re both showmen who live for the limelight and would probably sacrifice artistic freedom or efficacy for the sake of fame and fortune, given the opportunity.
This tendency in Kanye would be obvious from his appalling exploits of rubbing shoulders with Donald Trump (a president who certainly did very little for black people in the ghetto, although calling him an overt “racist” I think might be a tad ham-handed). For how “conscious” of a rapper he sometimes seemed, he like Eminem would self-deprecate for the sake of crowd-pleasing and throw in a rhyme like “And yes barely passed / Any and every test / Lookin’ at every a** / Cheated on every test”, whereby the truth factor seems somewhat occluded but more than that irrelevant within the larger objective of creating a hip-hop product that will appeal to the masses by way of a sort of caricatured clown phenomenon.
His whole career, I think, Jay-Z has been pretty much slipping in and out of artistic uprightness, ranging from tough-minded, silver-tongued “ghetto spokesman” [1] to obnoxious, verbose salesman of vapid, materialistic American culture. This latter element is probably what he is designed to do, overall, and has every bit to do with a “mainstream” artist’s lyrical outplay feeding into the corporate motives of the record label employing him, which I think is certainly a pretty rampant if not invariable happenstance in American popular music, with few exceptions.
Now, whether or not this particular phenomenon has anything to do with the fact that The Black Album has been ubiquitously acclaimed by both critics and fans despite the fact that it’s pretty much a piece of dog sh**, I’m not sure. I’m not even really too sure that it matters but either way it’s likely a case of correlation vs. causation — that is, even if the corporate American machine didn’t specifically INITIATE some thought control measure to increase the popularity of this album [2], it’s not coincidental that the rapper we’re talking about here is one with a pretty scant amount of scruples before bowing to the conglomerates. He exists, naturally, as a mainstream sellout, within the types of realms where popularizing propaganda would be facilitated.
So again… it’s pretty much a moot point as to whether the motive or agenda lay in the laps of corporate CEO’s or Jay-Z himself (who’s “not a business man” but “a business, man!”) [3]. There could have been a capitalistic motive or the mischievous operation could have just been catalyzed by Hova [4] himself, too, as by this time he was an industry man and had done well for himself for close to a decade, all on his home-baked label Roc-a-Fella Records.
Think the rap industry is a bona fide model of free market capitalism, good business and artistic integrity? Have you been living in a cave? We could start with, first of all, the very fame and popularity of P. Diddy (known in the 1990s as “Puff Daddy”), a miserable thug with zero talent. Disturbingly, Diddy stood to gain considerably by the death of The Notorious B.I.G., and the ensuing viral pervasiveness of the mega-hit single and video “I’ll Be Missing You” featuring 112 & Faith Evans (a song that, in the surprise of the century, rips off an old one, this time in the form of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take”). “I’ll Be Missing You” is a song celebrating the most thugged-out, goony gangsta rapper ever this side of Big L, after his death (for which no defendant was ever convicted, mind you), and, lo and behold, saw the single released on Diddy’s label, Bad Boy. One hand washes the other hand.
In a somewhat similar move, leading into the tepid, hubristic and generally laughable The Black Album, Jay-Z faked the death of his own career, ensuring everybody that he was “retiring” and that this ’03 LP would be his final project as a rapper. The whole thing looked believable enough, really: Jigga [5] was hugely popular on the strength of singles like “Big Pimpin’” and “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” and the new collection of singles, “99 Problems” and “Dirt off Your Shoulder,” had a certain finality about them, a certain gravity and a certain personal aspect, as if finally Hova were letting us know who he really was on tracks that could still bang on hip-hop stations or at parties.
For the record, I think both of these singles are to this day a success, both commercially and artistically, perhaps a little more so with “Dirt off Your Shoulders” than “99 Problems.” But they’re like two little toadstools in Mario Brothers surrounding what’s otherwise a pretty fetid bath of lava and man-eating alligators. Tepid, bland tracks like “Change Clothes” and “What More Can I Say” do very little toward telling us who the He** Jay-Z is or expanding the boundaries of hip-hop in any degree, and “Encore” is a downright sham, a douche-bag-fest that features about one minute of rapping and two minutes of this bizarre sound bite of this dude expressing a dogmatic adoration for Jay-Z, and leading crowd chants.
In general, we can’t go one minute on this mine field without hearing this dude say how great he is, and to be honest, he got away with it on the strength of a couple good hits, both earlier in his career and on this album, fair and square. At some point, I think, when somebody sh**-talks as much as Jay-Z does, a certain element of cognitive dissonance sets in where it’s hard to actually evaluate everything he’s saying: it’s like when a president’s press secretary answers a question through circumlocution, pedantic language and the broaching of umpteen unrelated issues and events which paint a favorable picture of the president and essentially eradicate his wrongdoing, for all intents and purposes.
But no album with “Encore” on it should gather more than a 50% rating, particularly if this uncultivated, egomaniacal piece of pig slop is placed at track four, which it is on The Black Album. I think a lot of what I’m trying to say, anyway, does boil down to that promise Jay-Z made that this was really his last album. That is, for how commerical and obnoxiously egotistical he could be, sh**, we fans of hip-hop didn’t want him to retire: sh** he really had a lot to say. So I think a certain idolizing instinct kicked in in us in our evaluations of this LP. And it certainly didn’t help us level our heads that he brought in a sound bite of his mom saying he “gave her no pain” in pregnancy, all on track two, nonetheless. There’s also the “black” imagery involved in the album’s marketing, which calls to mind a scene of a funeral or an ending in this sort of regard. In short, Hova really fu**ed with our heads in a couple cheap, monetarily ambitious ways on The Black Album, and for how frustrating it is to talk about, it’s equally kind of funny and also kind of gratifying to notice in terms of sociology, as this whole phenomenon resembles a company’s marketing campaign you might see in a commercial or billboard. Is it really that inappropriate or bewildering to get ambitious subterfuge from a rapper who’s a business, man?
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[1] On what’s probably my favorite album he ever did, Vol. 3… The Life and Times of S. Carter, there’s a track called “Dope Man” whereon he refers to himself as “ghetto spokesman.”
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[2] Before you call me a complete wacko remember this was pretty close in time after 9/11, when a veritable culture of fear and suspicion was shrouding our entire nation, and the masses we’re more easily led than you might think in terms of what they choose to embrace or reject.
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[3] This ingenious, obnoxious and overall quintessentially “Jay-Z” line comes in Kanye’s tune “Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix).”
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[4] Hova, one of Jay-Z’s nicknames according to L.A. Live, is “Hova, short for J-Hova, is a play on the word Jehovah, the Hebrew word for God.”
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[5] This is another one of Jay-Z’s nicknames.