Decoded (51 page)

BEACH CHAIR / FEATURING CHRIS MARTIN

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1.
This song is written like a will to an unborn child in anticipation of the day when I wake up from the dream of life.

2.
What’s clear here is that being “about my paper” is not me being all about money, but being all about the drive for success, 24-7, every day of the year. That drive is what got me where I am and in some ways is who I am. So already I’m sort of contradicting—or at least complicating—the idea that “life is but a beach chair.”

3.
On my first single, “In My Lifetime,” the hook was
What’s the meaning of life?
In the video I make a toast that gives some idea of what I was thinking back then: “May your glasses stay full of champagne, your pockets full of money; this world is full of shit.”

4.
I had recently been in London, where Abbey Road, famous from the Beatles album of the same name, is. But the real point here is the movement from the projects to walking the most famous streets in the world.

5.
When you get the things you think you’ve always wanted, it doesn’t stop the voice in your head’s interrogation. If anything, it gets more insistent.

6.
This is probably something everyone feels at some point. If the things that we feel are true—about the way the universe and God work—then we’re good. But what if I’m going about it totally wrong? What if there’s some price to pay that I haven’t calculated?

7.
Colleek is my nephew, who died in a car crash when he was eighteen—the car he was driving was a graduation gift I’d bought for him. It was one of the most devastating events in my life—my nephews are like sons to me—and in some ways I blamed myself. (I described that situation in the song “Lost One” on this same album.)

8.
This is a familiar saying and something that’s worked its way into a lot of religious traditions: the idea that our children pay for our sins. It’s a frightening idea—we make most of our mistakes when we’re still nearly children ourselves, before we’ve even fully figured out right and wrong, much less considered the effect of our behavior on lives that haven’t even been born yet. I don’t believe it’s true. It’s enough that we pay for our own mistakes. But who really knows?

9.
This is me trying to make a deal with the universe: I’m hoping that if I live right through all my tomorrows it will pay for the fucked-up shit I did yesterday, so that she—the daughter I’m imagining—won’t have to live in the shadow of my sins.

10.
Carol’s Daughter is a company that makes skin-care products (“to shade her face”) but is also a company I invested in, which is a way of saying that I’ll leave her whatever she needs, materially or spiritually, to protect her from the harshness of life.

11.
In the projects, especially back in the eighties, things were so violent that you literally went to sleep to the sound of gunshots some nights. You grow up fast like that. The second meaning here is that Karma catches up to other guys—in the form of gunshots putting them to sleep—but not me, at least not so far. And I’m not going to let fear of death slow me down.

12.
It’s always been most important for me to figure out “my space” rather than trying to check out what everyone else is up to, minute by minute. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself—and that’s essential for any artist, I think.

13.
This is how it feels when you’re in the hood hanging out and then a Benz rounds the corner. You see the dude in the Benz and you feel a surge of something, maybe hope. The guy who hops out of the Benz is familiar—a normal guy, like you, in some ways—but he got out of that tight situation you’re still in. Where I’m from, that guy in the shining Benz was almost always a hustler, not a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. Seeing that level of success is powerful. The image tells a dramatic story and drew a lot of us into lives of crime. But the good thing about it is it also gave us all a kind of hunger for success that motivated us to do
something
more than just hold down the project benches.

14.
There’s a double entendre here, but there’s more, too: In Greek mythology, a character named Icarus and his father, Daedalus, tried to escape from their imprisonment. Daedalus built two pairs of wax wings for himself and his son so they could fly to freedom. Before they took off, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun. But once Icarus got in the air, he forgot all about that and kept soaring higher and higher. He got too close to the sun, and his wax wings melted. He kept flapping his arms, but without wings he crashed into the sea, where he drowned. It’s a great story, but sometimes we have to ignore the lesson of it, especially those of us who come from backgrounds where there’s always someone telling you to quit or to keep a low profile. We can’t be afraid to fly—or to be fly—which means soaring not just past our fear of failure but also past our fear of success.

15.
This is why we shouldn’t be afraid. There are two possibilities: One is that there’s more to life than the physical life, that our souls “will find an even higher place to dwell” when this life is over. If that’s true, there’s no reason to fear failure or death. The other possibility is that this life is all there is. And if that’s true, then we have to really live it—we have to take it for everything it has and “die enormous” instead of “living dormant,” as I said way back on “Can I Live.” Either way, fear is a waste of time.

16.
In a way this captures the theme of my entire catalog—moments of triumph and success, the “winner’s cup,” intercut with dark, cold days, “winters” so severe they threatened my life.

17.
This was also the chorus and last line of “Never Change” from
The Blueprint
album, whose opening lines capture the same sentiment—
Hov summer or winter, Hov dead or alive.

18.
This takes us back to one of the recurring questions I’ve been trying to figure out in my songs: How can we know what’s right, what’s wrong? You’re born into this world in a random way. There are no guides. So much depends on where you’re born and who your influences are. It’s like in the song “Regrets” where the young kid is
in search of higher learning turning in every direction seeking direction
but doesn’t find any. People give you books—the Bible, the Qu’ran—but they don’t define you. All of the directional language in this verse:
compass, map, look, guide,
in the end point the listener inside, toward their own hearts.

19.
A series of wordplays—
pro’s
and
prose
;
cents
and
scents
—bring the song to its finish. Even though I’ve just said that it’s your heart that defines you, I’m still trying to give this unborn child something more than that: a blueprint for life. A map, a guide, a scent to follow.

LUCIFER

Back to Lyrics

1.
Kanye brought me this amazing track. The hook—
I’m gonna chase you out of earth / Lucifer, Lucifer, son of the morning
—comes from a classic roots-reggae joint from Max Romeo called “I Chase the Devil.” Lucifer is a figure in the Old Testament book of Isaiah: “How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” Interestingly, he’s never directly identified as the devil in the Bible, just a fallen angel. I don’t believe in the devil myself, or at least not in the guy with horns and a pitchfork. But I do believe we all have the potential for evil inside of us, which is very real.

2.
This is another conversation with God, which is, as always, also a conversation with myself, trying to make some kind of ethical sense of my own choices.

3.
If there is a justification for murder, it’s that your own life is threatened. It seems obvious, but it raises questions: When can you be sure that the only way out is preemptive murder? Is violence the only way to prevent violence? Is murder ever a good answer? Even if you save your life, what about your soul?

4.
I’m repeating the Lord’s own words to him because he “said it better than all”: If he can allow himself to take vengeance, then why can’t I?

5.
The “best boy” I’m referring to here is Biggie. This is actually a song about his death and the way it destroyed my sense of a just universe. Here’s the thing about Big: when you got past all the grotesqueries in his lyrics, all the Richard Pryor comic exaggerations, he was one of the most decent, peaceful guys I knew. One night back in ’96, maybe, we were hanging out together at Daddy’s House, the studio that Bad Boy Records owned, and I played him “Streets Is Watching,” a song I’d just finished for my second album. He played it twenty times in a row and gave me a sideways look: “Is the whole album going to sound like this?” He loved me, but at the end of the day, we’re all MCs, all competing. He was mad that the song was so good, but happy for me at the same time. He had already started work on his own second album—he played “Hypnotize,” “Downfall,” and a few other songs for me that night. I was mad but happy, too. Anyway, we left the studio and had dinner with a couple of friends—Ty-Ty and D-Rock—and then we headed out to a club, maybe Mirage or Exit or Carbon, one of the hot clubs at the time in Manhattan. We pulled up to the club and saw some niggas out front who we knew had some problems with Big, crazy guys, the kind who would be happy to shoot up the club just to settle some tired beef or just for the fuck of it or to improve their reputation. Big looked at me and told me straight up: “I’m not going in there.” I was young and dumb, and my ego wouldn’t let me drive away. I thought Big was scared. I told Ty-Ty,
Fuck it, we’re going in.
And we did. But Big wasn’t playing. He pulled right away from that club and went the fuck home. He wasn’t scared; he just didn’t want to waste his time with that kind of bullshit. He had bigger goals and wasn’t going to get derailed on some silly shit. He had started on the streets but developed greater insight and clarity about the futility and wastefulness of that kind of petty violence. For someone like that to get shot and killed the way he did tore me up. The whole Tupac beef was so pointless. Big just tried to avoid the whole thing. He never did anything wrong in that situation. His death was so senseless, so wrong, that it drove me crazy with rage and sadness.