Decoded (17 page)

It’s a recurring story in hip-hop, the tension between art and commerce. Hip-hop is too important as a tool of expression to
just
be reduced to a commercial product. But what some people call “commercializing” really means is that lots of people buy and listen to your records. That was always the point, to me. After my first record got on the radio and on BET, it was wild being at home, feeding my fish, and suddenly seeing myself on TV. But it was satisfying. Hearing it on the radio was even better. There may be some artists who don’t believe in radio, especially now, because the radio business is such a shady racket, but radio love puts you in the hood for real. I care if regular people—sisters on their way to work, dudes rolling around in their cars—hear my shit. I’m a music head, so I listen to everything. People around me are passionate about music. We study music, seek it out. I know there are a million music blogs out there and people who are willing to put in the work finding new music on them. But I like to reach people who get their music from clubs and the radio and television, too. I want my music to play where those people live. While there’s something intensely personal about what I rap about, I also make choices in technique and style to make sure that it can touch as many people as possible without it losing its basic integrity.

There are sometimes two Jay-Zs when you look at my music. There’s the one who can drop a “Big Pimpin’” or “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me),” songs that are intended for wide audiences, designed to just get listeners high off the sheer pleasure of them. And then there are the deeper album cuts, which are more complicated. The entire package is what makes an album. I think it’s worth it to try to find that balance. It’s like life—sometimes you just want to dumb out in the club; other times you want to get real and go deep.

Even then, the idea some people have of “dumbing down” is based on a misperception of what a great rap song can do. A great song can be “dumbed down” in the sense that it appeals to a pretty low common denominator—a big chorus and a great beat and easy-to-follow lyrics can get you a hit (but even then there’s an art to combining those elements). But that’s not the whole story: A great hit can also give listeners a second layer, and then a third, and more.

The song that’s probably the biggest hit in my career so far, “Empire State of Mind,” is a great example of how this can work. On the “dumb” side, it’s driven by Al Shux’s incredible track, Alicia Keys’s giant arc of a hook, and my in-the-pocket flow—those are completely universal in their appeal. The next layer down is the storytelling. For a hit song, the narratives are pretty ambiguous: They’re about loving a city for all the regular guidebook stuff (the Yankees, the Statue of Liberty, et cetera), but also recognizing it as the place where I used to
cop in Harlem
and have a
stash spot
where I cooked up work like a
pastry
. There’s a great tension between the anthemic, even hopeful chorus and the lines about the
gang of niggas rollin with my click
and
corners where we selling rocks
and the story of girls who come to the
city of sin
and get turned out.

And for the hip-hop heads who come looking for technique, it’s got all kinds of sneaky Easter eggs if you’re a close listener: the way I played with the flow on
and in the winter gets cold in vogue with your skin out
to also make it sound like a reference to Anna Wintour, the editor of
Vogue
(which conjures the image of glossy fashion as a counterpoint to the literal meaning of the line); the way I turn the old cliché about New York being a “melting pot” into a fresh reference to the drug game; the way I use the punchy sonic similarity between “bus trip,” “bust out,” and “bus route” to amplify a metaphor about getting sexually exploited. Even little shit—the Special Ed shout-out or the line about LeBron James and Dwayne Wade—forces you to keep listening beyond the “dumb” elements. And then there are the bits of snap philosophy—
Jesus can’t save you life starts when the church ends
—and punch lines with new slang like
nigga, I be Spiked out, I could trip a referee.
It’s a trick I learned from all the greatest emcees: a “dumbed down” record actually forces you to be smarter, to balance art, craft, authenticity, and accessibility.

When I first heard the track for “Empire” I was sure it would be a hit. It was gorgeous. My instinct was to dirty it up, to tell stories of the city’s gritty side, to use stories about hustling and getting hustled to add tension to the soaring beauty of the chorus. The same thing happened with another big hit, “A Hard Knock Life.” The chorus is a sweet-sounding children’s song, but the lyrics are adult: violent and real. Knowing how to complicate a simple song without losing its basic appeal is one of the keys to good songwriting.

LET ME HANDLE MY BUSINESS, DAMN

The other part of “commercialization” is the idea that artists should only be thinking about their art, not about the business side of what we do. There was maybe a time when people in hip-hop made music only because they loved to make music. But the time came when it started to pay off, to the point that even dudes in the street started thinking, “Fuck selling drugs, this rap shit is going to be my hustle!” A lot of people came to hip-hop like that, not out of a pure love of music, but as a legit hustle, another path out of the hood. I’ve reflected some of that in my music because, to be honest, it was my mentality to some degree—when I committed to a career in rap, I wasn’t taking a vow of poverty. I saw it as another hustle, one that happened to coincide with my natural talents and the culture I loved. I was an eager hustler and a reluctant artist. But the irony of it is that to make the hustle work, really work, over the long term, you have to be a true artist, too.

In the streets there aren’t written contracts. Instead, you live by certain codes. There are no codes and ethics in music because there are lawyers. People can hide behind their lawyers and contracts and then rob you blind. A lot of street cats come into the music game and expect a certain kind of honor and ethics, even outside of contracts. But in business, like they say, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. So I mind my business and I don’t apologize for it.

There’s this sick fascination with the dead artist, the broke artist, the drugged-out artist, the artist who blows all his money on drugs and big chains and ends up on a VH1 special. Or artists so conflicted about making money from their art—which so often means making money from their pain and confusion and dreams—that they do stupid shit with it, set it on fire or something. This is a game people sometimes play with musicians: that to be real, to be authentic, you have to hate having money or that success has to feel like such a burden you want to kill yourself. But whoever said that artists shouldn’t pay attention to their business was probably someone with their hand in some artist’s pocket.

I’m getting courted by the bosses, the Edgars and Doug Morrises-sss /
Jimmy I and Lyor’s-ses
¹
/ Gotta be more than choruses / They respect-ing my mind now, just a matter of time now / Operation take over corporate /
Make over offices
²
/ Then take over all of it / Please may these words be recorded / To serve as testimony that I saw it all before it / Came to fruition, sort of a premonition / Uh, uncontrollable hustler’s ambition /
Alias superstition / Like Stevie, the writing’s on the wall like my lady, right baby?
³
/
Saw it all before some of y’all thought I was crazy
⁴
/ Maybe like a fox I’m cagey / Ah, ah, the more successful, the more stressful / The more and more I transform to Gordon Gekko / In the race to a billion, got my face to the ceiling /
Got my knees on the floor, please Lord forgive him
⁵
/ Has he lost his religion, is the greed gonna get him? /
He’s having heaven on Earth, will his wings still fit him?
⁶
/ I got the
Forbes
on my living room floor /
And I’m so close to the cover, fucker I want more
⁷
/
Time
’s most influential was impressive / Especially since I wasn’t in the artist’s section / Had me with the builders and the titans / Had me right with Rupert Murdoch /
Billionaire boys and some dudes you never heard of
⁸
/ Word up on Madison Ave is I’m a cash cow / Word down on Wall Street homie you get the cash out /
IPO Hov no need for reverse merger
⁹
/ The boy money talks no need to converse further / The baby blue Maybach like I own Gerber /
Boardroom I’m lifting your skirt up
¹⁰
/ The corporate takeover

Moment of Clarity. (2:27)

(Wooo) (Yeah) / (Turn the music up turn the lights down I’m in my zone) / [
Chorus
] /
Thank God for granting me this moment of clarity
¹
/ This moment of honesty / The world’ll feel my truths / Through my
Hard Knock Life
time / My
Gift and the Curse
/
I gave you volume after volume
²
of my work / So you can feel my truths / I built the
Dynasty
by being one of the realest niggas out / Way beyond a
Reasonable Doubt
/ (You all can’t fill my shoes) / From my
Blueprint
beginnings / To that
Black Album
ending / Listen close you hear what I’m about / Nigga feel my truths / When Pop died / Didn’t cry /
Didn’t know him that well
³
/ Between him doing heroin / And me doing crack sales / With that in the egg shell / Standing at the tabernacle / Rather the church / Pretending to be hurt / Wouldn’t work / So a smirk was all on my face /
Like damn that man’s face was just like my face
⁴
/ So Pop I forgive you / For all the shit that I live through /
It wasn’t all your fault
⁵
/ Homie you got caught / And to the same game I fought /
That Uncle Ray lost
⁶
/ My big brothers and so many others I saw / I’m just glad we got to see each other /
Talk and re-meet each other
⁷
/ Save a place in Heaven / till the next time we meet forever / [
Chorus
] / The music business hate me /
’cause the industry ain’t make me
⁸
/ Hustlers and boosters embrace me / And the music I be making / I dumb down for my audience / And double my dollars / They criticize me for it /
Yet they all yell “Holla”
⁹
/ If skills sold / Truth be told / I’d probably be / Lyrically /
Talib Kweli
¹⁰
/ Truthfully / I wanna rhyme like Common Sense / (But I did five mil) /
I ain’t been rhyming like Common since
¹¹
/ When your sense got that much in common / And you been hustling since / Your inception / Fuck perception / Go with what makes sense /
Since
¹²
/ I know what I’m up against /
We as rappers must decide what’s most important
¹³
/ And I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them / So I got rich and gave back / To me that’s the win-win / So next time you see the homie and his rims spin / Just know my mind is working just like them / (The rims that is) [
Chorus
] My homie Sigel’s on a tier /
Where no tears
¹⁴
should fall / ’cause he was on the block where no squares get off / See in my inner circle all we do is ball /
Till we all got triangles on our wall
¹⁵
/
He ain’t just rappin for the platinum
¹⁶
/ Y’all record / I recall / ’cause I really been there before /
Four scores and seven years ago
¹⁷
/ Prepared to flow / Prepare for war / I shall fear no man / You don’t hear me though / These words ain’t just paired to go / In one ear out the other ear / NO / YO /
My balls and my word is all I have
/
What you gonna do to me?
/
Nigga scars’ll scab
/
What you gonna box me homie?
/
I can dodge and jab
/
Three shots couldn’t touch me
¹⁸
/ Thank God for that /
I’m strong enough to carry Biggie Smalls on my back
¹⁹
/ And the whole BK nigga holla back