JAY-Z

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • 4:44
    4:44

    2017

  • The Blueprint 3
    The Blueprint 3

    2009

  • American Gangster (Deluxe Edition)
    American Gangster (Deluxe Edition)

    2007

  • The Black Album
    The Black Album

    There are plenty of good reasons why The Black Album is such a pivotal JAY-Z album. For starters, it’s beautifully written—a record heavy on personal detail, but not too bogged down to lose sight of the outside world. And while JAY-Z keeps up with the mainstream (as on the Timbaland-produced smash “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”), he has enough self-respect to know that he’s most at home with the kind of sounds he grew up with—so long as he can modify them for a new era, as he does on “Encore” and “99 Problems.” Most importantly, The Black Album finds Jay confronting his mid-thirties—a time when some artists begin to check out or compromise—and deciding that accepting your age doesn’t mean sacrificing your vitality. He once said he never thought his own life was particularly special—after all, every family has its mythologies. But when your livelihood depends in part on making your listeners understand your struggles as their own, The Black Album’s inward turn offers a newly relatable JAY-Z. He lets you into his world, and the various roles he plays in it, whether it’s as a son (“Moment of Clarity,” “December 4th”), as a Black American male (“99 Problems”), or as someone who always feels best when they’re breaking through and moving forward (“My 1st Song”). That kind of confessional honesty anchors The Black Album: When Jay feels like a pimp, he honors it (“Dirt Off Your Shoulder”). But he’s no longer afraid to say he feels like a cappuccino, either (“My 1st Song”). You won’t mistake your life for his—if we could all be him, there are probably a lot more people who would. But the relatively human scale of The Black Album showed rap fans that longevity in rap was possible; that you could age into yourself without aging out of the art. The rumor that greeted the album’s release—a rumor he later wrote off as a miscommunication—was that Jay was going to retire. And so he goes out and raps like you’d need an army to hold him back. “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on, I’m complex,” goes a line on “Public Service Announcement.” Maybe it’s that simple.

  • The Blueprint
    The Blueprint

    Before he was "a businessman" or "a business, man," JAY Z was one of rap’s best rhymers. Soul samples courtesy of Just Blaze and Kanye West gave 2001’s The Blueprint the glossiest sounds money could buy. The exuberance of the single “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” is balanced by the poignancy of “Song Cry.” Even if JAY Z weren't sitting on the pop and rap throne, his cold diss track (“Takeover”) directed at Nas would still show he wasn’t a man you'd want to cross.

  • Reasonable Doubt
    Reasonable Doubt

    Here’s a head-scratcher for Jay-Z fans: Why wasn’t Reasonable Doubt considered an instant classic back in 1996? After all, Jay’s debut album puts his lyrical skills on full display. And the subject matter on Reasonable Doubt, while familiar—this is a record that goes deep on the perils and spoils of the drug trade—is rendered with a density that makes it feel new. Yet for all the album’s well-deserved accolades, hit singles, and sales accomplishments, Reasonable Doubt was still viewed as a bit of an outlier upon release—as was Jay himself. Whereas Nas’ work brimmed with writerly introspection, and Biggie’s verses exuded raw charisma, Reasonable Doubt-era Jay is somewhere in-between: He depicts himself as a born hustler who embraces the high life, but who seems too preoccupied to enjoy it. Is the Jay we meet on Reasonable Doubt supposed to be a hero? (No way—he’s too cold.) A villain? (Nope—too empathic.) It’s hard to get a handle on a guy who, on Reasonable Doubt, sometimes sounds so soured on his own success. “We hustle out of a sense of hopelessness,” Jay proclaims on the intro to “Can I Live.” “Sort of a desperation/Through that desperation, we become addicted/Sort of like the fiends we accustomed to servin’.” The Jay-Z who dominates Reasonable Doubt may be rich—or at least on his way—but with beats so spare, and a delivery so quietly intense, you could easily mistake him for starving. That tension can be felt throughout the record, on which Jay lays out a grand vision—wealth, mobility, autonomy—which he executes with a scrappy attitude and a small budget. On Reasonable Doubt, Jay twists words for sport (“Two 22’s”) and flexes like a battle rapper (the Biggie-featuring “Brooklyn’s Finest”). And when he explores the moral ambiguity of his business, it isn’t for pity or forgiveness, but to externalize a reality he knows doesn’t make sense (“Regrets”). “Don't cry, it is to be,” he raps on “D’evils.” “In time I'll take away your miseries and make ’em mine.” Reasonable Doubt doesn’t just capture his ambition—it captures his PTSD. The album is an evolutionary step toward the lavish, corporate-don rap that came to define the late 1990s—and that Jay himself would help to define, in no small part through his future work with Puff Daddy. But Reasonable Doubt also captures the gritty details of urban life that had defined hip-hop—especially New York hip-hop—since “The Message,” or even The Last Poets. That Jay had to start his own label, the soon-to-be-mighty Roc-A-Fella Records, to actually get it out makes a kind of sense: For however big he became, Reasonable Doubt feels rough and underground, the sound of a self-made striver who has limitless confidence, yet who still can’t tell his fish fork from his dessert one. Jay famously once said that he’d quit rapping after Reasonable Doubt to take care of the business of running Roc-A-Fella (a move that forecasted the expanding opportunities of Black artists in pop music). But this is an album that makes his creative and commercial ambitions clear, no matter how torn Jay might feel about them. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the boardroom.

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About JAY-Z

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. 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. By the time he released 1996’s Reasonable Doubt, he said he was the oldest 26-year-old you’d ever want to meet. 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. 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. Add 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. 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.

HOMETOWN
United States of America
BORN
December 4, 1969

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