Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
This week: Jay-Z struggled long and hard to go from a childhood in New York's Marcy Projects and a young adulthood spent selling drugs to famously headlining a sold-out "retirement" show at Madison Square Garden. He followed it up with a similarly dramatic, high-profile shift from being hip-hop's biggest star to the guy with the corner office whom everyone on his label complains isn't doing enough to promote their album. With Jay-Z's American Gangster now on the shelves, it's an excellent time to look back at the long, distinguished career of one of Brooklyn's finest.
Jay-Z 101:
After bubbling under the radar for years, most infamously as the hype man for mentor Jaz-O in the beyond-embarrassing early-'90s "Hawaiian Sophie" video, Jay-Z broke defiantly and permanently into the mainstream with 1998's Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life, a savvy combination of gangsta grit and pop so infectious that even churchgoing grandmothers could sing along to the choruses.
Where fatalists like Scarface, 2Pac, Nas, and Notorious B.I.G. wrestled constantly with suicidal despair in their death-haunted music, Jay-Z was too interested in making a killing as a businessman to contemplate killing himself. So his hits pumped up the celebratory vibe of crossovers like B.I.G.'s "Juicy" while purposefully avoiding the pitch-black nihilism of his gangsta-rap peers. This made him more palatable to mainstream audiences, but also robbed his music of depth. On his weaker albums, Jay-Z can come off as cold and calculating, a businessman more interested in making money than art.
The Annie-sampling crossover smash "Hard Knock Life" was an unapologetically pop tribute to the good life, and a defiant celebration of Jay-Z's ascent from an orphan of the streets to hip-hop's Daddy Warbucks. With Hard Knock Life, Jay-Z traded some of his underground cachet for mainstream riches while holding onto his status as a critics' darling, but his shiny pop stardom came at a price: By glossing up his sound and dumbing down his lyrics, he undoubtedly lost some of the purists who gravitated to Reasonable Doubt. It was a trade-off he was obviously willing to accept.
From Hard Knock Life onward, producers weren't considered hot unless Jay-Z rhymed over their beats. Any rapper with a healthy recording budget can rhyme over a Timbaland or Neptunes beat. Jay-Z's genius was to find, nurture, and become synonymous with the hottest producers alive. So, did Jay-Z score hit after hit because he was working with top producers, or did top producers score big hits because they were working with Jay-Z? There's truth in both answers. Jay-Z enjoys an unusually symbiotic relationship with the top ranks of hip-hop beatsmiths. As the fascinating scenes of Kanye West, Pharrell, and Timbaland peddling their wares to Jay-Z in the concert documentary Fade To Black convey, Jay-Z is a picky, demanding collaborator who brings out the best in the people he works with.
He's had less success grooming rappers. Though the market rejected some of his pet artists (Memphis Bleek, cough, cough), and he rejected others (Amil, whose career sank after Jay-Z kicked her out of Roc-A-Fella's inner circle) the upper echelon of hip-hop luminaries is studded with producers Jay-Z propelled to stardom, especially on the production side.
With the 2001 album The Blueprint, Jay-Z made superstars out of beatsmiths Kanye West and Just Blaze, two sample-based producers whose lush, cinematic soundscapes tapped into a vibrant vein of soul music. Jay-Z's lyrics followed suit. "Song Cry" said it all.
On standout tracks like "Heart of The City (Ain't No Love)" and "U Don't Know," Jay-Z made music rich in emotion and pathos, timeless songs that wouldn't feel as dated as the wiggly electronic sound that powered his early hits. Appropriately enough, the guest-rapper-light album became the sturdy blueprint for many of his subsequent triumphs, most notably The Black Album and American Gangster.
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