Jay-Z rehearsing for his appearance this summer at Radio City Music Hall. At the concert he performed his debut album, “Reasonable Doubt,” in its entirety.
IF you had visited the Def Jam offices on Election Day, you might have noticed a red and blue placard leaning against a potted plant in the lobby. It said, “Jay-Z: The name you can trust.”
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Jay-Z, Past and Present
Jay-Z is about to release a new album.
Unlike most political slogans, this one is accurate, more or less. For the last decade Jay-Z has been the world’s most reliable rapper, a hitmaker beloved by fans and respected by his peers. (Even, or especially, the ones who envy his career.) Obsessives pore over his intricate early rhymes. Clubgoers rap along with evergreen hits like “Big Pimpin’ ” and “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me).” Gossip lovers gawk at photographs of him with his longtime girlfriend, Beyoncé. Bloggers argue over his place in hip-hop’s pantheon. And if you’re a real Jay-Z fan, you can probably do all those things at once.
Jay-Z retired, sort of, after “The Black Album” in 2003. But even as an ex-rapper, he managed to stay atop the hip-hop heap. He was named president of Def Jam Records two years ago, but none of the rappers on his roster have come close to outshining him. His own boasts have come to seem like statements of fact: “I’m a man of principle/Damn near invincible.”
But Jay-Z is risking his carefully maintained reputation by releasing a new album, “Kingdom Come” (Roc-a-Fella/Island Def Jam). It arrives in shops on Tuesday. And two weeks before the release date, he could be found ensconced in his corner office at Def Jam, lounging in jeans and construction boots, sipping white wine from an oversized glass. He happily agreed to talk about the new album, but he issued a warning before he played it: It was very “adult” sounding, he said. “It’s not Barry Manilow, don’t let me fool you. It’s just intelligent.”
Jay-Z, who turns 37 next month, has been advertising this comeback since before he went away. In “Encore,” a song from “The Black Album,” he rapped, “When I come back like Jordan, wearin’ the four-five/It ain’t to play games with you/It’s to aim at you, prob’ly maim you.” (That “four-five” was typically sly: a reference to Michael Jordan’s post-comeback jersey number, and also to a kind of pistol.) But now that he’s back, he doesn’t seem to be in an aim-and-maim mood. Despite Jay-Z’s reputation for supreme confidence, “Kingdom Come” is full of uncertainty, maybe even anxiety.
The frothy lead single, “Show Me What You Got,” is a bit misleading. While there’s plenty of bravado here, Jay-Z also rhymes about the perils of celebrity, his recent tour of Africa (to publicize the water crisis) and his own shortcomings. In “Minority Report” he criticizes President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina, but he also finds fault in himself: “Sure, I ponied up a mil, but I didn’t give my time/So in reality, I didn’t give a dime.” It’s the last thing we expected to hear from Jay-Z: an apology.
It was a decade ago that he released his debut album, “Reasonable Doubt.” By his own account he was a Brooklyn rapper turned drug dealer turned rapper again, and the album established him as one of the slickest. He could deliver complicated rhymes while still sounding conversational, and his pop songs were as witty as his crime narratives. In the years that followed he got more versatile and more subtle. On “The Blueprint,” his classic 2001 album (his sixth, if you’re keeping track), he compressed four minutes of bravado into an elegant eight-syllable simile: “We run streets like/Drunks run street lights.”
Even while he was dazzling listeners with wordplay, Jay-Z took pains to present himself as a mercenary hustler, not some sensitive poet. He was, he now says, “a reluctant rapper,” not least because the rappers he knew earned less than drug dealers. And even as his career grew, he loved to remind listeners that he viewed hip-hop as a lucrative hustle, not a sacred art form. He offered rival rappers some unsentimental advice: “If you ain’t in it for the money, then get out the game.”
And yet here he is: a guy who clearly doesn’t need the money, getting back in the game. In an odd way Jay-Z’s tenure as a businessman — or, as he once put it, “a business, man” — has helped him realize how much he loves rapping. “You really start caring, and really start to fall in love,” he said, sounding a bit sheepish. “Over the years I’ve come to respect my gift.”
Back when he was merely a virtuoso, he eagerly portrayed himself as a slick executive. Now that he really is a slick executive, he wants to remind everyone that he is still a virtuoso, still “Kingpin of the ink pen/Monster of the double-entendre,” as one new song has it. (Likewise the scrappy Brooklyn kid who wore a tie on his first album cover now wears construction boots in his corner office.) “I’m just a hustler disguised as a rapper,” he claims. But many fans may suspect that the reverse is true, and always has been.
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In any case Jay-Z clearly misses the old days, an era when he was younger and hungrier. At Radio City Music Hall in June he performed “Reasonable Doubt” in its entirety (the new album will include a bonus disc featuring songs from the concert); it’s still his favorite of all his albums. And he smiled when asked about his old, tongue-twisting style.
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Jay-Z, Past and Present
“I was speeding,” he said. “I was saying a hundred words a minute. There were no catchphrases, there was no hooks within the verses. I was very wordy.”
Like a maturing athlete, he slowed down a little and smartened up a lot. “I don’t know if I’ve gotten better," he said. "I think that I’ve definitely gotten more rounded.” What interests him now, he said, is finding the “nooks and crannies” of a beat. And when he wants to make a point, he deliberately interrupts his flow, adding pauses and unexpected changes in meter, forcing people to pay attention to the words instead of letting them glide by. He does this a lot on “Kingdom Come.” It is his ninth album, not counting the two CDs he made with R. Kelly, the one he made with Linkin Park or his “MTV Unplugged” CD. And it is, by design, the most uncomfortable-sounding album of his career.
In one sense that’s a surprise. He is, after all, a rich mogul with a celebrity girlfriend; he long ago moved from Brooklyn to Alpine, N.J. And while some other rappers (including Cam’ron and the Game) have baited him with implicit or explicit insults, Jay-Z has generally refused to return fire. Last year he reconciled with his former enemy Nas, who now records for Def Jam. Jay-Z’s life seems downright pleasant.
But in another sense it’s no wonder he sounds uncomfortable; he is now out of place in the hip-hop world that made him a star. Many of the most popular rappers these days are young Southerners, whereas Jay-Z is a Brooklynite who can call himself 30-something for only a few more years. He still commands respect, but not fear; if he says he’s going to shoot someone, everyone knows it’s hyperbole. He knows the latest dance trends because he’s paid to, but he would sound pretty silly trying to start one of his own. As Nas (33) has aged, he has grown grumpier; as Snoop Dogg (35) has aged, he has grown more playful. But what is happening to Jay-Z?
He doesn’t seem entirely sure. He knows he wants to avoid imitating his past successes. “You end up looking like a caricature of yourself,” he said. And although the album contains a few barbs about the state of hip-hop (“I’m afraid of the future/Y’all respect the one who got shot, I respect the shooter,” he rhymes; perhaps it’s a reference to 50 Cent), he is equally determined to avoid becoming a cranky old veteran, reminiscing about the good old days. Ten years ago he released a song called “Can’t Knock the Hustle”; now, as hip-hop welcomes a new wave of brash hustlers, he’s trying to stick to that credo.
“Kingdom Come,” then, captures the sound of a grown-up rapper trying to make a grown-up album — whatever that means. It’s a fascinating experiment, and a halfway successful one. In “Oh My God,” Just Blaze builds a beat from a screaming rock ’n’ roll sample (it’s Genya Ravan, belting out the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post”), and Jay-Z spends four glorious minutes talking trash. “Do U Wanna Ride” has a smooth Kanye West beat and a smoother John Legend chorus. And in “30 Something,” Jay-Z nimbly tap-dances around the subject of gunplay, bragging about a fully automatic pistol, then changing his mind and changing it again:
Don’t let the patent leather shoes fool you, young’un
I got the fully in the tux
That was my past, now I’m so grown up
I don’t got one gun on me
Got a sum on me to hire a gun army
Getcha spun like laundry
And I’ll be somewhere under palm trees
Calmly listening to R&B
The choppy meter and near-rhymes (on me/army/laundry/palm trees/calmly/R&B) underscore his indecision.
“Beach Chair” was produced by Chris Martin, from Coldplay, who also sings the chorus; it’s supposed to be dreamlike (Jay-Z said he was inspired by Portishead) but sounds dreary instead. And while Beyoncé sounds great on “Hollywood,” an Usher collaboration called “Anything” falls flat. The problem is that Jay-Z, who has always seemed more interested in power than sex, sounds downright bored when he pays tribute to strippers. He twice mentions Sue’s Rendezvous, the legendarily seedy Mount Vernon, N.Y., club, but he sounds as if he’d rather be elsewhere — under those palm trees, perhaps.
Although the first half of 2006 had only one platinum-selling hip-hop album (“King,” by T. I.), Jay-Z is releasing “Kingdom Come” during one of the busiest hip-hop seasons in memory. It will have to compete with eagerly awaited CDs from the Game and Snoop Dogg, a new Tupac Shakur compilation, and discs from Nas and Young Jeezy — both of whom are Jay-Z’s competition and also, as Def Jam artists, his corporate assets.
True to form, Jay-Z claimed to be optimistic. Hesaid that he expected longtime fans to follow his evolution. And the younger ones? Would a 15-year-old Jay-Z have enjoyed an album like “Kingdome Come”? He responded the way any canny label president would. “It would have been aspirational to me,” he said, and he found an analogy: “I used to like James Bond when I was little.”
No matter what happens with “Kingdom Come,” it seems unlikely that this CD will be Jay-Z’s last. Maybe he thought that getting older would make it easier for him to walk away from hip-hop. Instead, getting older has made it easier for him to admit how much he loves it. He has sworn off any more promises of retirement, saying, “I’ll never say that again.” Of course he can’t rap forever; “It’s gon’ be a day I stop,” he said. But he doesn’t sound as if he’s looking forward to it.
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