by Jay-Z
8. Even in a song about pushing pleasure to the limit, I can’t help but make the connection between the “big pimpin” and the work that makes it possible—which takes us from the cars, women, and the alcohol, the sun, the mansion, and Carnival—and brings us back to the streets, the corner of the block, the coke, and the potential for a long prison bid hanging over me like a cloud. The recklessness of the pleasure—the selfish craziness of pimping—matches the recklessness of the work.
9. The girls bring us back from the grim reminder about the work, but not all the way. I’ve already made it clear that these are not girls that I’ll have a relationship with, these are girls that I’ll “thug, fuck, love, and leave,” and these same girls, “laughin it up,” are definitely not going to be holding me down if I do get caught out there. One way or another, in real life, the laughter is going to end. But not in this song. Here, the laughter is the last thing you hear, because this is a song about that moment of pleasure, not about consequences and regrets. But the tension of what comes next also lingers.
STREETS IS WATCHING
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1. This is one of my most often repeated lines. I’m describing asymmetrical warfare, where one side has much more to lose than the other side and it applies to all kinds of situations.
2. This is a song all about paranoia. To be watched by the streets themselves, clocked by the block, means you’re being watched by everyone and everything all the time, all looking for the slightest opening to come at you.
3. To ignore the predatory streets is a quick way to get extorted—but in this case, I mean extorted for your time, your life, with a long prison sentence.
4. “One in the drop” = one in the chamber.
5. Arms are frozen from “ice” (ice = diamonds, in this case, on a watch or bracelet), ironically the ice means I “can’t chill.”
6. The warm gun follows the frozen arms, and both mean that the gun is no longer being used—“you gotta keep your heat up.”
7. A hazard in any successful business is that the one at the top gets relaxed—“feet up”—and becomes addicted to the sweet life, which marks him as weak to all the sharks circling below him. The funny thing about this is that even bullies—the ones who reach the top—can be soft and weak. As soon as they get exposed, it’s a wrap.
8. A couple of deadly children’s games. Getting tagged here is like a permanent game of freeze tag. And when they play “follow the leader,” it’s not out of obedience, but more like a predator tracking prey.
9. More dangerous than the cats who want to kidnap you for dough are the killers just trying to make their reputations, because those are the ones you can’t negotiate with; it’s kill or be killed.
10. The line really means that no matter if I’m actually on the streets or not, my mentality—“hustle harder”—is the same. The narrator of the song is the sort of high-level drug dealer who has to prove that he isn’t sweet, even though he’s not literally on the streets—he has to prove his street mentality to keep his credibility on the block.
11. This is a regular theme in gangster narratives, especially in hood stories. There have always been smart guys in the game who wanted to just focus on making money—to put all the gorilla shit to the side, all the thugging and stupid rivalries, and work together, because all the rest, the violence and animosity, actually hurt your money and create unnecessary collateral damage. These are the guys who thought you could run a criminal operation like a Fortune 500 company on some Stringer Bell shit. When I was in the streets, I was all about making money. I wasn’t in it for the violence or making a rep and all that. But in the end, between the cops, the crazies, and the poison product, it’s a fucked-up game, and it’s hard to play it clean.
12. The language tells the story: Even though I call my crew “staff,” like it’s a regular company, most staffs aren’t made up of criminal defendants and corpses.
13. Even when you find some “success,” the paranoia and guilt tighten around you like a noose.
14. I switch up here from a moment of conscience back to the practical details of the work. It’s like the work has such a hold on me that it interrupts every other thought.
15. This is based in reality. The last crew I worked with was largely incarcerated in a sweep that happened after I’d started moving into the rap game.
16. It’s a small thing, but it’s rare that you’ll hear a rhyme in the whole “crack rap” genre where the narrator acknowledges the damage to innocent people that occurs in the game.
17. In the end, I make it even more autobiographical by talking about my own transition from someone living the life to someone telling its stories in rhyme, where disagreements don’t lead to death.
OPERATION CORPORATE TAKEOVER
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1. Edgar Bronfmann is CEO of Warner Music Group, Doug Morris is CEO of Universal Music Group, Jimmy Iovine is head of Interscope, and Lyor Cohen, CEO of Recorded Music at Warner.
2. When I did this freestyle, I was president of Def Jam, a gig I landed after being courted by Universal and Warner. The “makeover” wasn’t just about rearranging the chairs. It was about changing the orientation and spirit of the business. That’s what hip-hop has tried to do whenever it gets into the boardroom. It’s not about sitting behind the same desks and doing work the same way as the people that preceded us. Our goal is to take what we’ve learned about the world from our lives—and what we’ve learned about integrity and success and fairness and competition—and use it to remake the corporate world.
3. “Superstition” is the Stevie Wonder classic, of course; The Writing’s on the Wall was the name of the record album from Destiny’s Child.
4. In the song I keep talking about seeing it all before and it’s true—not that I was prophetic, but that I always used visualization the way athletes do, to conjure reality.
5. “Face to the ceiling” and “knees on the floor” creates a simultaneous image of straining ambition and humble prayer and forces your mind to reconcile that contradiction.
6. This refers to the biblical verse about the meek inheriting the earth. If I’m Gordon Gekko in this life, do I sacrifice my place in heaven?
7. I'm close to the cover physically—it’s on the floor, just out of arm’s reach—but also close to the cover in the sense of being nearly successful enough to be on the cover of the magazine.
8. Time had me in their “most influential” issue with builders and titans and “people you never heard of,” the kind of wealthy industrialists who don’t get on the covers of magazines but quietly run the world.
9. Lots of business lingo piles up here. I’m turning the business world’s terminology into the raw material for the rhyme.
10. This is an aggressive final image to make the point that I’m like a lot of people that came out of hip-hop—our ambition was never to just fit into the corporate mold, it was to take it over and remake that world in our image.
MOMENT OF CLARITY
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1. The most famous lines in this song are about my philosophy of music and the tension between my commercial instincts and my instincts as an artist. But the first verse is all about my father.
2. After Reasonable Doubt, my next three albums were called Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 3, with subtitles—In My Lifetime, Hard Knock Life, and Life and Times of S. Carter. The Volume series was meant to emphasize the connection between the albums, that each was a continuation and expansion of the same basic story.
3. This sounds cold, but the truth is that my father left my family for good when I was young and didn’t reenter my life until I was an adult. Three months after we had our first conversation in twenty years, he died. My mother had pushed for the meeting because she knew he didn’t have long and she didn’t want him to die with our issues still unresolved. So at the funeral I was more intrigued than devastated.
4. When I did finally see my father again and we stood face-to-face, it was like looking in a
mirror. It made me wonder how someone could abandon a child who looked just like him.
5. My father and I didn’t have a lot of deep conversations before he died, but we did have one important one. When I first reconnected with him, I hit him with questions and he came back with answers until I realized nothing he could ever say would satisfy me or make sense of all the feelings I’d had since he turned his back on us. In the end, he broke down and apologized. And, somewhat to my surprise, I forgave him.
6. The death of my father’s brother, my uncle Ray, changed everything for my pops. Ray was murdered outside of a crowded Brooklyn bar and everyone knew who did it, but the police didn’t do anything about it. My dad swore revenge and became obsessed with hunting down Uncle Ray’s killer. The tragedy—compounded by the injustice—drove him crazy, sent him to the bottle, and ultimately became a factor in the unraveling of my parents’ marriage. As a kid, I didn’t know all this. I had no idea that it was the death of his brother that undid my dad. When I found this out I realized that yeah, of course every father that bounced had a reason. I didn’t excuse him for leaving his kids, but I started to understand.
7. Although this verse starts off on a cold note—I seem indifferent and even smirking about his death—that’s only me being honest. I didn’t cry. I didn’t know him that well. But at the same time, it was so important that we did meet up before he died. It was important for me to hear him say he was sorry and for me to hear myself say, “I forgive you.” It changed my life, really. I wish every kid who grew up like me could have the same chance to confront the fathers who left them, not just so they can lay out their anger, but so they can, in the end, let that anger go. That anger still stunts so many of us.
8. I was lucky in some ways to have come into the game on my own two feet—along with my partners Biggs and Dame—and not because the industry wanted to make me the flavor of the month and then throw me away.
9. I love that this has become such a popular line for people to riff off of in hip-hop—Lupe Fiasco did a great song called “Dumb It Down” that brought the whole thing full circle, for example—since the point of the line was to provoke conversation.
10. Kweli is a great MC—as is Common—and they’ve both carved out impressive careers without big records. They’re great technical MCs, but there is a difference between being a great technician and a great songwriter. I deeply respect their craft, but even the most dazzling lyrical display won’t translate to a wide audience unless it’s matched with a big song.
11. This whole lyric is overstated—and I love Common—but I’m trying to make a point. I didn’t come into the rap game just to enjoy my own rhymes; I could’ve done that by myself in my house with my tape recorder. I came into the music business to reach as many people as possible—and to get paid.
12. I use “sense” or “since” six times in the preceding nine lines, alternating between them, a technical flourish that works as its own commentary.
13. Ultimately, every artist has to make a choice about what makes the most sense for them, and I’m not mad at whatever they decide. To honor the art of lyrical rhyming on one hand, and try to reach a wide audience on the other, is an art form in itself. It’s not easy, but that’s just another challenge that I love to take on.
14. The homonym of tiers and tears connects prison tiers with crying—but you can’t cry in prison (at least not out in the open).
15. This geometric series—block/square, ball/circle, and then triangle—is the kind of unnecessary technical challenge I like to drop into songs just to give the lines extra energy and resonance. The “triangles on our wall” refer to platinum plaques; Billboard magazine’s symbol for platinum sales is a triangle.
16. Even though earlier I made the point about doubling my dollars, here I’m being clear that the rapping isn’t just for sales, because I’ve already sold millions—so there’s still something deeper at work.
17. A play on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—except instead of his “four score and seven years ago,” my “four scores” are four number one albums, and “seven years ago” goes back to the beginning of my career.
18. This is about not having fear: “Scars’ll scab” means that even if you injure me, I’ll recover; “I can dodge and jab” means that swinging on me won’t stop me; and even “three shots couldn’t touch me.” The whole point of the “moment of clarity” is that after I confront my own demons, I’m left with nothing but “my balls and my word,” which makes me untouchable.
19. Biggie was huge, arguably the greatest of all time. Carrying him on my back means taking the weight of all he represented. But the image of Biggie—who wasn’t skinny—on my back reinforces how hard it is to do.
BREATHE EASY (LYRICAL EXERCISE)
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1. I developed that habit of holding rhymes in my head from working so hard on the streets. When I was still a teenager I might be on the corner when a rhyme came to me. I would have to run to the corner store, buy something, then find a pen to write it on the back of the brown paper bag till I got home to put it in my notebook. I couldn’t keep doing that because I had to concentrate on work, not on scheming to get my hands on brown paper bags. So I created little corners in my head where I stored rhymes. Once I got good at it, I actually preferred it as a technique. I’m not sure it’s better than writing shit down, but it’s the only way I know. When I was working on the Kingdom Come album, I tried to sit down and actually write my rhymes, but it just doesn’t work that way for me.
2. “Spar in the ring” referred to performing at the Apollo in Harlem. Malcolm was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom, a couple miles away.
3. “Spring train in the winter” refers to the fact that most of my albums dropped in the fall or winter. The suicide drills refers to the drilling I get from doing press before the album releases, which I find as tedious and uncomfortable as athletes find suicide drills.
4. Hova is, of course, short for Jay-Hova, which is a play on Jehovah—a piece of wordplay that irritates the fuck out of some religious people. They should just relax and listen to the next line.
5. These exercise metaphors describe the hustler’s routine—running, pullups, and pushups.
6. Stretching coke means figuring out ways to cut it with baking soda so you have more than you originally purchased. You can only stretch the work if it’s already premium quality.
7. More exercise imagery used to describe a hustler’s threats: squats, sets, reps, and showers. This whole rhyme—a bonus track on the Blueprint album—is really about technical rhyming, like the rhymes Jaz and I used to come up with just to challenge ourselves. In this case, the challenge is to create as many clever rhymes as possible using the exercise metaphor—I tried to fit one into every line, and nearly succeeded. The whole thing curves in on itself in this final double entendre in the first verse: The “lyrical exercise” is to compose lyrics about exercise.
8. Again, my exercise in the song largely consists of lifting guns (an “eight” is a .38) and quantities of drugs. This also reminds me of a photo of Shaq lifting Kobe after the Lakers won their first championship in the Kobe/Shaq era. (One of Shaq’s nicknames is “Diesel” and Kobe wears the number 8.)
9. Felix Trinidad is a boxer who knew his way around the ring, and when your ring joins your watch, so will I.
MY 1ST SONG
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1. “Chips” is slang for money, and championships, which relates to Hakeem Olajuwon, who won multiple championships in the NBA in college.
2. The rhyme scheme here is pretty dense. The pace is double-time and the lines are all stuffed with internal rhymes, which gives the song the breathless rhythm of my earliest songs, when I was essentially a speed rapper.
3. “Me, Myself and I” was a song by De La Soul, a trio that featured the rapper Trugoy.
4. Brain scientists are actually starting to discover that this is true: The only way we learn how to take responsibility is to take risks
when we’re young—which, if you’re not under regular adult supervision, usually means fucking up, playing with fire, getting burned. But it’s not the kid’s fault—it’s his nature. The fault is in a society that doesn’t protect him from himself.
5. “Ain’t No Half-Steppin” was a hit in the eighties by Big Daddy Kane. It sampled “Ain’t No Half-Steppin” by Heatwave, a funk group in the 1970s. Kane’s version has in turn been sampled a dozen times in other rap songs.
6. This is a song about hunger, and a big part of being hungry is never slipping, never missing a chance to strike. One of the great lessons to me was in 1998, when DMX released two number one albums in the same year. It was crazy. But he was hot, and he proved that the market would support an artist who was willing to supply it while he was at his peak of popularity. It takes a serious work ethic to keep up that kind of production at a high level.
7. I’m doing a bad Prince impersonation with this line, referencing his line in “Adore,” You could burn up my clothes / smash up my ride (well, maybe not the ride). Of course, my breakup with the music biz wasn’t permanent, but the message of the song is still true.