He spends most of his time in a plush executive suite, or on the beach with a bikini’d Beyoncé. But Jay-Z was born a hustler, and his hard-boiled new album takes him back to the days when he sold crack and hid from the cops. Can American Gangster return him to hip-hop glory?
Like any other New Yorker, Shawn Carter commutes to work — only in the back of a Rolls-Royce. BlackBerrying his way through Manhattan, the six-foot-two hip-hop colossus sits with feet splayed in brown–and–beige Nike Dunks, their orange threads subtly rhyming with the tangerine collar of his sweatshirt. Baggy Rocawear jeans and an Audemars Piguet watch complete his streetmillionaire look: that of a rap king who wears his crown lightly.
“This is not my
job, you know what I’m saying?” says Jay-Z, referring both to making music and serving as president and CEO of Def Jam Records. With part ownership of the New Jersey Nets, booming businesses in restaurants, liquor and other fields, and a net worth of $286 million, Jay-Z doesn’t have much of a profit motive. “At this point I do it for love.”
Love was not the obvious motivation behind Jay-Z’s 2006 album,
Kingdom Come, his first after declaring he’d retired from making records. His slam-dunk of a swan song, 2003’s
The Black Album, captured the era’s most respected and popular rapper at the height of his powers, but
Kingdom Come came off like an act of brand repositioning, its triumphs more synergistic than musical, its underwhelming tracks mercilessly marketed with tie-ins to Anheuser-Busch, Hewlett-Packard, Cherry Coke, the NBA—just about everything but TrimSpa.
“I knew going in that people might not understand it,” says Jay-Z, defending
Kingdom Come. “Some people loved it, some people panned it. Maybe the marketing raised expectations too high.”
When he hung up the mic, Jay-Z could claim to be the greatest rapper ever who’d never been killed. But
Kingdom Come moved few people outside Madison Avenue and tarnished his legacy. Instead of sheepishly returning to retirement, though, Jay-Z has made an album that’s not only worthy of that legacy but also a revelation, partially because it brings him back to the days before he could spell Audemars Piguet.
Not long after releasing
Kingdom Come, Jay saw an early cut of the film
American Gangster. The drama, starring Denzel Washington and directed by Ridley Scott (
Blade Runner,
Gladiator), follows the career of ’70s Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas. A man who can lay legitimate claim to that most elusive and prized of urban epithets, “the black Scarface,” Lucas built a drug empire whose reach and power came to surpass even that of the Mafia — thanks largely to his CEO-like attention to branding and a reservedness that helped him fly under the police radar. Given Jay-Z’s own history as a former street dealer turned privacy-minded music czar, it’s not hard to see why the story might resonate.
“It just brought back so many emotions,” Jay-Z says of the film. “I went through something very similar to what Denzel’s character went through, and the movie brought me back to a time that I never thought I’d get back to.” Fired up, Jay-Z set about writing the songs that would make up his 10th solo album,
American Gangster — a concept record that’s part crime story, part rise-and-fall epic, part retrospective on the years that made Shawn Carter Jay-Z.
The life of Jay-Z is hip-hop’s standard rags-to-riches story writ as large as a Times Square billboard. Born in Brooklyn’s desolate and crime-controlled Marcy Projects, Shawn Corey Carter was raised with three siblings by his mother. By the time he left high school he was an amateur rapper with a tongue-twisting style — and a professional drug dealer with an interstate trade. Jay-Z recorded his 1996 debut,
Reasonable Doubt, while still deep in the drug game. Its detailed storytelling and moody jazz tones reflected the thrill, danger and regrets of his hustling life, making the album an unimpeachable hip-hop classic. Jay-Z joined the highest echelon of MCs. Then, with his street bona fides cemented, he began a conquest of pop stardom.
His reign over the pop and rap worlds is unparalleled: a decade of near-constant hip-hop acclaim, a headline-grabbing duel with no less esteemed a foe than Nas, a run of chart domination that spanned the rise of Atlanta crunk, Houston rap and countless other boomlets. He landed one of the world’s hottest singers (if not females), Beyoncé Knowles. He’s won every battle worth winning.
With
American Gangster, Jay-Z is communing with his past self, revisiting the criminal life he so masterfully depicted 11 years ago. “It’s like a hybrid of
Reasonable Doubt — as far as the lyricism and the emotions of the songs,” he says, “and
The Blueprint, with the sound and scope of the music.”Calling upon a dream team of producers — Pharrell, Just Blaze, Diddy and the Hitmen, Bigg D — Jay crafted 15 cinematic tracks in response to the film. With plush orchestrations, live drums, funky organ and cascading piano, the album suggests a hip-hop take on New York blaxploitation — think
Superfly or
Across 110th Street — with the three-act story arc of classic gangster films.