Jay-Z
But what product he’s churned out. Time was, nobody could match Jay’s reinvigorating touch with a been-there-done-that idea. When he’s on, the man can work miracles of lyrical novelty while never straying from his favorite subject–how great it is to be Jay-Z. His rhymes bristle with unexpected metric shifts that never jar against the track–he navigates the rhythmic nuances of his 1998 hit “Can I Get A…” with unflappable calm while Timbaland’s stuttering beats reduce guest artists Amil and Ja Rule to hapless braying. And his jokes parachute in from out of nowhere–when he brags about his Mercedes 600 collection, he says he’s “got more Sixes than first grade.”
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But though Jay-Z’s subject matter has remained constant, his popularity seems to be waning. His fifth album, The Blueprint, camped out at the top of the Billboard charts for a month, selling almost 500,000 copies during its debut week despite its inauspicious release date of September 11, 2001. From “Ain’t No ” in 1996 to “Izzo” and “Girls, Girls, Girls” in 2001, his singles have locked down prime real estate on the radio–on a recent DJ Mikey Mike mix-tape freestyle, he bragged, “I get so much airplay / You’d think I got a deal with British Airways.” But while his current sleepwalk of a single, “’03 Bonnie and Clyde,” is enjoying endless exposure, the album that spawned it is struggling. Less than two months after its release, his new double CD, The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse, is sliding slowly but steadily down the charts, now resting uneasily in the 20s.
For a guy with a carefully manicured public image as a coldhearted veteran of urban warfare, Jay-Z tends to be slightly antic with his wordplay; even at his darkest (which is pretty goddamn dark), he can sound like kind of a goofball. On his early masterwork “D’Evils” he tortures a rival’s wife in order to learn her hubby’s whereabouts. After literally feeding her wads of cash, Jay can’t resist a bleak punch line: “She said the taste of ones was shitty / So I fed her fifties…’til her shit started to make cents.” Exploding such a convoluted pun in the middle of a parable about money and corruption throws the story into sharper relief.
There are already enough Jay-Z copycats on today’s rap radio: those few precious moments of non-Jigga airtime have been ceded to player’s-club members like Ja Rule (sample song titles: “Livin’ It Up,” “Murder, Murder”) and Cam’Ron (who’s so big on conceptual clarity he named an album Sex, Drugs and Entertainment). There’s nothing on Blueprint 2 we haven’t heard before; what’s worse, we’ve heard it all exactly this way before.
