The Black Album was posited as both a "retirement album" and yet another celebration of the life and career of Jay-Z, a man for whom every day is his birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth Of July combined. The hype was ubiquitous and unavoidable: Only Jay-Z could make a major selling point out of the fact that he was actually writing his lyrics down this time, instead of stashing them away in his mental Rolodex minutes before hitting the booth. The hype continues with the first track, "December 4th," which opens with Jay-Z's mom gushing, "He was the last of my four children / The only one who didn't give me any pain, when I gave birth to him / And that's how I knew that he was a special child."
Like a hip-hop episode of This Is Your Life, The Black Album brought together many of the people who made that special child into an icon, from Kanye West and Just Blaze to Timbaland and the Neptunes, in addition to newcomers like 9th Wonder and The Buchanans. The Black Album showcased a more introspective side of Jay-Z, who eschewed even a single guest rapper. It would have made for a terrific swan song, if only Jay-Z, with his Barnum-esque flair for self-promotion, had made good on all those retirement promises.
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It's telling that where Irv Gotti and Suge Knight chose the label names Murder Inc. and Death Row in a more-or-less successful bid to scare the bejeezus out of white America (and thereby win the affection of teenagers everywhere), Jay-Z and his comrades chose Roc-A-Fella, a variation on a name synonymous with old white money. Jay-Z has always been a capitalist first and an artist second. Where other gangsta-rap luminaries venerated the street hustler as an outlaw living outside the strictures of a racist, oppressive power structure, Jay-Z posited the crack dealer down the block as the model of a smart, flexible small businessman. For Jay-Z, selling drugs was a means to an end, not an existential destiny. He's a hustler, baby, albeit one willing and eager to leave the street behind.
Jay-Z's purest album, 1996's Reasonable Doubt, is filled with the gut-wrenching angst of the black-market businessman whose fat bank roll can't begin to cover up the shame of poisoning his community and making his mom cry. But Jay-Z made sure to undercut the brooding with celebratory swagger, most notably on the Notorious B.I.G.-assisted "Brooklyn's Finest," an atomic bomb of a New York anthem that forever linked Jay-Z to B.I.G.'s outsized legacy. Jay-Z's lightning-fast flow betrays his debt to the tongue-twisting virtuosity of Fu-Schnickens and Das EFX, while the cinematic imagery, Scarface worship, and mafia fixation in his lyrics show a clear debt to Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.
Jay-Z had to simplify his style to win over the mainstream, which leaves Reasonable Doubt an invaluable document of him at his rawest and least compromising. His biggest commercial triumphs were still to come, but not even Jay-Z, with his limitless self-regard, could have imagined that he'd still be on top 11 years later. An oft-overlooked key to Jay-Z's success lies in his precise diction: In sharp contrast to the slurred, grimy delivery of his rival 50 Cent, Jay-Z enunciates clearly even when using slang destined to confound much of his white fan base.
Perhaps the most famous and influential illegal bootleg ever created couldn't have existed without The Black Album. Danger Mouse's 2004 breakthrough project The Grey Album fused samples from The Beatles' sprawling masterwork The White Album with a cappella vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album, for the mash-up to end all mash-ups. Though a vast army of lawyers ensured that the result would never receive anything resembling a legal release, the project instantly transformed Danger Mouse from a respected but semi-obscure underground producer to one of the hottest and most sought-after beatsmiths around.
The album surprisingly works as something more than a cheeky postmodern stunt. Danger Mouse stays away from obvious samples and transforms the familiar into new and nearly unrecognizable sounds, while Jay-Z holds his own against rock royalty. Throughout his career, Jay-Z has traveled smoothly between the mainstream and the underground, gangsta rap and the pop world. Here, he crashes into the rarified domain of classic rock, like Aerosmith bursting into Run DMC's rehearsal space, with similarly influential and delightful results.
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