Decoded (38 page)
Authors: Jay-Z
Tags: #Rap & Hip Hop, #Rap musicians, #Rap musicians - United States, #Cultural Heritage, #Jay-Z, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #United States, #Music, #Rich & Famous, #Biography & Autobiography, #Genres & Styles, #Composers & Musicians, #Biography
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Al Pacino as Tony Montana, © Matt Buck/Rodrigo Corral Design, illustration based on a photograph by UNIVERSAL PICTURES/Album/Newscom
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Christ the Redeemer, © Bert Kohlgraf/Flickr/Getty Images; Instant Karma album artwork, © Rodrigo Corral Design; water, © Nadav Kander/Gallery Stock
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ocean, © Andreas Ren/Gallery Stock
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cross mural, © Myriam Babin/Rodrigo Corral Design
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bible mural, © Myriam Babin/Rodrigo Corral Design
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beach/dunes, © Alex Telfer/Gallery Stock
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compass, © Rodrigo Corral Design
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rosary, © Simon Lee/Rodrigo Corral Design
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fallen angel, engraving by Gustave Doré, photograph by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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clouds, © Kim Ripley; Our Life album artwork, © Rodrigo Corral Design; buildings, © Myriam Babin/Rodrigo Corral Design
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Lauryn Hill, © Everett Collection/Rex USA
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Maya Angelou, © Aaron Rapoport/Corbis
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Chi- Lites, © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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CBS logo, ® and © 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved.
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Jay- Z fans, © Ben Watts/Corbis Outline
Notes on Lyrics
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
1.
This is Just Blaze’s voice, although he recorded it in a way that made it sound older, like a political speech from the Black Power era captured on a distant tape recorder.
2.
A simple double entendre of “Roc-A-Fella,” our company, which we call the Roc, and “rock,” common slang for crack because of the way the coke crystallizes when you cook it. I drop the “frying pan” into the next line to keep the comparison going. In the line after that I complete the connection between selling rock and selling the Roc, supplying the streets and supplying the music biz. Both take ruthlessness. In fact, the music industry is the fire to the crack game’s frying pan.
3.
The
flier/flyer
homonym also carries the momentum of the
fire/supplier
rhyme for one more line.
4.
The D.O.C.’s “No One Can Do It Better” was an early classic of the West Coast’s golden age.
5.
This line combines two separate pieces of slang—“check” means to collect, “cheddar” means money—to create a third piece of new slang—“a food inspector”—that only makes sense if you decode the first two phrases. “Check cheddar” is an alliteration that adds force to the image.
6.
My friend Strict uses the phrase “finish your breakfast” as a way of saying that you need to finish your job up strong.
7.
In these four lines I use five different variations on “do” and “dude” (plus “jewels,” whose hard “j” sounds almost like a “d”) to create a percussive rhythm within the beat.
8.
“Jay-Z sported a white T emblazoned with Che’s image, perhaps a case of game recognizing game …” —Elizabeth Mendez Berry, “The Last Hustle,”
The Village Voice,
November 25, 2003.
9.
Just to amplify the connection I’m trying to make between revolutionaries and hustlers, I invoke Malcolm’s famous “By Any Means Necessary” slogan.
10.
A drought in the game is when the supply or demand starts to dry up—and that’s when resourceful hustlers have to start getting creative. If that means getting violent, the “brainstorming” might just lead to someone getting wet, as in bloody, which is why you need to get your umbrella out, for protection. It’s a dramatic, violent image to convey the way desperation and hunger can explode.
11.
Here’s where life gets “complex.” I’m innocent because I didn’t invent the game; the game came to the hood via a bunch of people from the outside: the big drug suppliers, the gun merchants, the corrupt officials who, at best, let it happen, or, at worst, were actively involved. And we—the hustlers at the street level—definitely didn’t invent the poverty and hopelessness that drove a generation of desperate kids to start selling drugs. But then there’s a point where I’m not so innocent anymore. It’s when I “do it twice.” The second time is not out of desperation to survive or to resist the status quo, but out of greed for the spoils of the game.
12.
And it’s not just the material spoils that keep you going: You start getting addicted to the thrill of it, the adrenaline rush of going to see your connect in a small building in Harlem in a lobby that you’ve never been in, where you go in with a bag of money and come out with a bag of work. Or the feeling when you come around the corner back home and all eyes turn to you because everyone knows who you are—you represent something successful and free and dangerous, all at once. You have the best car, the best jewelry, the whole package. You taste a strange kind of fame. It’s as addictive as the shit you’re selling, and just as deadly.
13.
“The ghetto people knew I never left the ghetto in spirit.” —Malcolm X
14.
You can put a new shirt on your back, slide a fresh chain around your neck, and accumulate all the money and power in the world, but at the end of the day those are just layers. Money and power don’t change you, they just further expose your true self.
15.
Elizabeth Mendez Berry wrote in her essay: “Squint and you see a revolutionary. But open your eyes to the platinum chain around his neck: Jay-Z is a hustler.” No doubt. It’s a simple truth, but complex, too. Identity isn’t a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.
AMERICAN DREAMIN’
1.
This is really where it begins, in a room with your feet up with your dudes. Too young to shave, dreaming about the big body Benzes you’re gonna push. Obviously for me, it’s in Marcy, but this could be anywhere—a basement in the midwest, a backyard in Cali, an Oldsmobile somewhere down South. The danger is that it’s just talk; then again, the danger is that it’s not. I believe you can speak things into existence.
2.
“Pitch” was slang for a hustle. Hustlers hoped to take a “mound” of work and turn it into a mountain of money. A mound is also the place you pitch from—which is why “we need a town.”
3.
This song samples Marvin Gaye’s “Soon I’ll Be Loving You Again,” a track that transports you to a blue-lit room in the seventies; you can practically smell the smoke from a joint coming out of the speakers.
4.
Our aim is the same as everyone, shooting for the American dream of success and wealth, but the target is a little different: Instead of trying to land in college or in a good job, I’m trying to get rich in the streets.
5.
The image of bags of coke the size of pillows connects with the image of a kid dreaming.
6.
In this verse I jump from it being about starving, a real and literal need, to desiring a 600-series Benz. It happens that quickly in the Life, too, in the real-life equivalent of two bars.
7.
Initially the decision to hustle is freestyled. These kids in the cipher, the ones with their feet up and the dreams of foreign cars, have absolutely no idea how to go into business, even one that surrounds them like the drug game. Do they know where to go to cop the work? No. Do they have a drug connect? No. They’re like anyone starting out in business; they need someone to give them the plan.
8.
A reference to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.”
9.
Tony La Russa is the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, often called the Cards.
10.
The “irony” refers back to the song’s wordplay and is itself a play on words: The “iron” in “ironies” also refers to the “bars” in the next line, the iron bars of a penitentiary.
11.
As with anything, you begin locally, in your own projects. The trip from Brooklyn to upper Manhattan once seemed as great a distance as going down South, or to a foreign country, with a foreign language. Repeat trips mean more money, familiarity with Papi, better relationships and credit. But credit is a vice, debt, a door-knocker.
12.
The repeated lines are just me creating an echo chamber. The well is a literal place to store and draw water. So I’m wishing my fellow hustlers the foresight to stash, to be resourceful, to see droughts and setbacks and attacks before they come, to have a plan from which to draw.
13.
The “insight” is a play on words—I’m not just wishing you insight, but sight in, the ability to see beyond what’s visible, to see even within your own soul.
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