JAY-Z

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • 4:44
    4:44
    4:44

    There are moments on 4:44 that might make you sit up and wonder why JAY-Z hasn’t been rapping like this all along. The hustler was compelling on his earlier efforts, and his ascent from the street to the boardroom changed rap. But there’s a sense of naturalness here that feels unmatched in his catalog, the unclenched jaw that comes before a long sigh of relief. You can hear that relief on a track like “Smile,” in which he raps about seeing his mother Gloria accept her sexuality late in life. It’s a song that lets you into Jay’s family—and offers an analogy for his own experience: “In the shadows people see you as happy and free,” Gloria notes on the song’s outro. “Because that’s what you want them to see/Living two lives, happy, but not free.” Jay could no doubt relate. The benefits of keeping up the front—his career, his artistic legacy, money—had dominated Jay’s public life by the time of 4:44. He’d spent 20 years thawing out in front of millions. And he was finally ready to be himself. And while circa-2017 JAY-Z existed on a plane high above us mere mortals, the ideas and anxieties underpinning 4:44 are surprisingly relatable. We all get to a certain age, you know. An age when transgressions feel heavier and less important to defend (“4:44”). An age when you’re proud of your achievements (“Family Feud”), yet still have days when you want to burn it all down (“Kill Jay Z”). An age when you’re wiser, for sure, and more humble in how you show it (“Legacy”)—but still stubbornly hanging onto hard conversations like a bulldog (“The Story of O.J.”). But if 4:44 is a midlife self-portrait, it’s one that coincides with a shift toward rappers excavating their personal messes as a show of artistic nerve. The consistency of the sound—soulful, understated, classic but interestingly fragmented—doesn’t just provide the album with a spine. It tells you that we’re all in one head, sharing one living, breathing perspective. For listeners familiar with The Sopranos, think of Tony squirming in Dr. Melfi’s chair. For everyone else, think of the middle-aged man who laughs because he’s too nervous to cry, and who knows he isn’t fooling anyone—and then, when you least expect it, lets it all go.

  • Watch the Throne (Deluxe)
    Watch the Throne (Deluxe)
    Watch the Throne (Deluxe)

    Watch the Throne is the first album where JAY-Z actually sounds relaxed. Not relaxed in that tight, who-you-callin’-funny kind of way, but relaxed like you’re on top of a mountain looking down into the valley: nowhere to go, because you’re already there. He’d been collaborating with Kanye West for more than 10 years, developing a chemistry that borders on fraternal—you sense Jay didn’t just stake his business on him, but his reputation. Where Jay is the head (detached, analytical), West is the messy, impulsive heart. Not only do they represent two different sides of the rap coin (Jay the projects-born hustler, West the middle-class auteur; Jay old-school, Kanye new), they draw out the distant regions of each other’s personalities: West’s confidence to be authoritative about the world beyond himself, Jay’s comfort to let down his guard and be loose. The result is music that is personal (Jay’s verse on “Welcome to the Jungle”), political (Kanye on “Murder to Excellence”), intoxicated by wealth and status but primitive in its aggression (“N****s in Paris”). As a musical guide, West has always been a perfect fit for Jay: The soul samples make him identifiable to conservatives pushing against the futuristic side of rap (“Otis”), but he doesn’t care enough about orthodoxy to let it hold him back—he doesn’t just sample Nina Simone, he runs her through Auto-Tune (”New Day”). Measure it against either one’s career arc and it’s a classic: Kanye gets to celebrate being hailed a genius after My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and JAY-Z gets to take a break from polishing his own monument long enough to remember how he built it. With the rise of Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, and Drake, Watch the Throne gets to rest in the knowledge of seeing the pendulum of rap swing back toward pure lyricism without sacrificing musical omnivorousness that helped it cross over 10 years earlier—a reaping not just for JAY-Z and West, but for their chosen art. Don’t let their boorishness fool you into thinking they don’t know what’s going on; the smartest guy at the board meeting is always the one in jeans. “Fuck that bitch; she don’t wanna dance,” West raps on “N****s in Paris.” “Excuse my French, but I'm in France.”

  • The Blueprint 3
    The Blueprint 3
    The Blueprint 3

    By the time The Blueprint 3 arrived in 2009, JAY-Z’s relationship to rap had gotten complicated. He’d headlined rock-oriented festivals like Glastonbury and materialized at shows by Brooklyn bands like Grizzly Bear, saying he hoped indie-rock might help shake up what he saw as the stagnancy of hip-hop. The Blueprint 3 positions him as an elder statesman of rap, one who condemn trends (“D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)”), but who isn’t afraid of the crossover moves that made him famous in the first place (the Rihanna-featuring “Run This Town,” the Alicia Keys-featuring “Empire State of Mind”). At one point on The Blueprint 3, Jay claims he’s so tomorrow, his watch says yesterday. But on the precipice of 40, he knows better than to worry about time. After all, plenty of rappers have excelled at the game; JAY-Z wrote the rules. So where to go? Talking to Oprah the month before the album came out—an event that in and of itself illustrates his transformation—Jay said the trouble with writing music people can relate to is that his life isn’t normal anymore. Thematically, The Blueprint 3 fixates on legacy: building it (“So Ambitious”), defending it (“Real As It Gets”), enjoying it (“Thank You”), and sharing it (“A Star Is Born”). Maybe Jay has bigger things to think about—Barack Obama once claimed he’s probably the only rapper to get played in the Oval Office. But on The Blueprint 3, his ego won’t let him rest from going after trap rappers (“Real As It Gets”) or smirking while he polishes his reputation. He’s happy to bring new voices to the table—including Drake (“Off That”), Kid Cudi (“Already Home”), and J. Cole (“A Star Is Born”)—but woe be to any who try and take his seat.

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

    JAY-Z once said that 2007’s American Gangster, inspired by the Denzel Washington crime flick of the same name, was a way for him to explore how his life might’ve gone had he never left the streets. That’s a hypothetical, of course—not to mention an example of his penchant for taking good stories and spinning them into better ones. So while Jay can still sell a classic drug-kingpin narrative from rise to fall—as he does on such American Gangster tracks as “Pray” and “Fallin’”—he also frames the hustle as a metaphor for the Black American predicament: It’s no less stressful than straight work (“Success”), nor is it easier to come by (“American Dreamin’”). And while nice stuff helps (as he points out on tracks like “Blue Magic” and “Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)”), it’s never enough to offset the guilt of having to sell yourself—and your community—out to get them. “This is that ignorant shit you like/N***a, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick, plus ice, c’mon,” Jay raps on “Ignorant Shit.” Don’t blame him for putting it on offer—ask yourself while you’re buying. By 2007, Jay had been around long enough to secure his new, grown-up life—ask Kingdom Come and The Blueprint 2. With American Gangster, he finds enough purchase on his old one to explore what he might’ve gotten wrong. If he still raps like his life depends on it, it’s because it does. It’s just a different life now.

  • The Black Album
    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 (“Dust Off Your Shoulders”). 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
    The Blueprint

    100 Best Albums There’s a 60 Minutes segment from 2002—a year after The Blueprint was released to universal acclaim—in which JAY-Z is asked what it means to “flow.” His answer is vague, and, for an artist so blindingly confident, a little muted: You sense he wants to be deferential to the opportunity, to embody the paragon he’d become, but that he also wants to represent hip-hop to mainstream America in a way that scans as respectful and considered—to paint rap not just as entertainment, but art. Just a few years earlier, JAY-Z couldn’t find a label. Now, he not only had the culture on his shoulders—he was helping to legitimize it for an audience that still might’ve written him off as a fad. Released on September 11, 2001, The Blueprint was hailed as a classic from the get-go, and deservedly so: It’s brutal (“Takeover”), arrogant (“Girls, Girls, Girls”), playful (“Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”), and disarmingly vulnerable (“Song Cry”). With the exception of LL Cool J, the culture didn’t really have examples of second lives. But The Blueprint pushed the lyrical parameters of mainstream hip-hop, while at the same time returning to the form’s origins, thanks to the album’s samples of classic rock and soul (courtesy, in part, to a young producer named Kanye West). The result was a record that would help establish rap as music with historic continuity—a style now old enough to have its own “retro.” So where past Jay tracks like “Big Pimpin’” and “N***a What, N***a Who” still sound like the future, The Blueprint captures an artist with enough of a grip on the present to consolidate his past—musically, lyrically, narratively. “Reasonable Doubt, classic/Shoulda went triple,” Jay raps on “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)”: a callback to his first album, yes, but also a reminder that he hasn’t lived it down. Can you be on top and still carry a chip on your shoulder? On The Blueprint, Jay has it all—and still wants more.

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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.

FROM
United States of America
BORN
December 4, 1969
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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