by Jay-Z
YOUNG GIFTED AND BLACK
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1. The song starts with a quotation from Louis Farrakhan.
2. It’s become a cliché among comics to do the “white people drive like this, black people drive like this” joke, but I’m trying to go a little deeper into the differences between us and “y’all.” And the y’all doesn’t just refer to race; a lot of these differences happen with people who share a race but differ in economic class.
3. My mom is at work trying to buy me the right gear, but that means she can’t be at home checking up on me. The value of two parents isn’t just sentimental, it’s practical. My real mom worked her ass off trying to make ends meet, but since she was doing it alone, no one was ever really there for me to come home to when I was a kid.
4. Straight jobs are scarce; crooked ones are much easier to find. It’s “right there” in front of my sight, unavoidable. Certain kids never think about not going to college because college graduates are everywhere they look. It doesn’t make them smarter or more moral, they’re just followers, like most people. For other kids, everywhere they look they see the drug game. They’re not stupid or immoral, they’re just following what they see.
5. And, of course, the dream is that selling the drugs will get you out of the hood. But more times than not, you get out by going to jail. Damn.
6. Outside of the ghetto, comfortable kids download music about our lives; but in the ghetto, we’re living in those crosshairs.
7. I mean straight in the sense of being okay, fine, taken care of, but I’m also referring to hair. Black women wear weaves made out of horsehair, in some cases, trying to emulate the naturally straight hair of white women.
8. Some of what I’m talking about here is the idealized vision that kids in the ghetto have about white people in the suburbs. We assume that their lives are carefree and happy, which is, of course, not necessarily true.
9. The metal can refer to prisons or bullets. Even their screams can’t be heard.
10. “A block away from hell” is how I put it in “Where I’m From.”
11. My cousin fell out of a project window. The bars on the window weren’t on right. It’s the kind of tragedy that makes you question God about the disparities in the way people live. When niggas in the game get shot, it’s tragic in its way, but you can maybe argue that they knew what was up when they got into that life. But when it happens to a kid, you realize that there’s something even more troubling going on in the universe, and you start wanting an answer. Or worse, you get used to it.
HELL YEAH (PIMP THE SYSTEM) / DEAD PREZ, FEATURING JAY-Z
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1. This is a surprising collaboration to both our fan bases, because we’re often thought of as representing entirely different aspects of hip-hop—which is true, in a way. But for all the beefs and rivalries, I’ve always seen hip-hop as a collective and never let anyone, even the fans, get me to believe that I’m doing something different, or more (or less) acceptable, than a group like Dead Prez.
2. The line “slipping through the cracks” connects the “drugs to be sold” and the “holes” that need to be plugged up. And the “drug to be sold” is, of course, crack.
3. I chose Portland because it’s the whitest place I could think of. I’m the “first black in the suburbs,” but the idea is that I get there through my music, not by actually living there. The music gets everywhere.
4. This is based on the way the cops, even today, stalk rappers like they’re criminals.
5. The media, in particular, has probably devoted as much time to complaining about rap music as they ever have over the real shit that goes on in the hood. The hypocrisy is stunning.
6. Becky is considered a classic white-girl name among black folks (and is also slang for a sexual act that is associated with white girls, for some reason). And no matter how much her parents want her to stay sheltered, popular music, of all things, teaches her about how the rest of the country lives.
7. The so-called “wigger” is ridiculed and stigmatized, in part because he scares the shit out of the powers that be, who see their next generation being influenced by a culture they despise.
8. Vietnam is obviously a metaphor for a place of warfare and violence, like the gang violence implied by the blue rag. Vietnam is also one of the many nicknames for my hometown of Brooklyn—they call it Brooknam—because it could feel like a war zone.
9. Hip-hop and hustling both represent ways of making money that pale in comparison to the crooked history of American power and wealth. What rappers and hustlers have made is a fraction of the real wealth generated by so-called legitimate businesses that have been a thousand times more harmful to society. Behind every great fortune, they say, is a great crime. Our fortunes—and our crimes—are not even in the same league as the real wealth in this country.
BEWARE (JAY-Z REMIX)
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1. Not my cleverest image, but it gets the point across and connects back to the Indian roots of the song (snake charmers are an Indian phenomenon). This opening was done in the spirit of a party song—fun, with a simple and catchy rhyme structure (one/young/two/you) and lyrics that evoke a crowded club.
2. I recorded this eight years after Reasonable Doubt. I was also planning on calling my next album 8th Wonder at the time—it ended up being The Black Album. And of course, Wonder is also bread.
3. A couple of subtle Snoop references in these lines, from “6 in the A.M.” and “P.I.M.P.”
4. The “track” connects back to the P-I-M-P line—pimps run their hoes on “tracks,” urban strips where clients come to find prostitutes.
5. SMPTE is a timecode attached to recordings so that they can be edited.
6. A play off of Biggie’s line from “Going Back to Cali”: it’s the N-O, T-O, R-I, O /-U-S, / you just lay down slow.
7. I was against the war, but wanted to be clear that I felt for the soldiers out there fighting it. I know people who joined the military, sometimes just because they didn’t have a better option, sometimes because they genuinely thought they were doing something for the good of the country. But soldiers in an army are like soldiers in the hood, to some degree—they’re really all fighting someone else’s war; they’re cannon fodder for men richer and more powerful than them. So I’m not going to attack the soldiers as a group, even if I think their leaders are idiots.
8. This is a weird line coming from me, given that I don’t usually rhyme about love being the answer. But I do sometimes get clear about the pointlessness of aggression, and this was one of those days. You have to be a special person—a Gandhi—to really live by that sort of ethic, and I know that if I’m provoked, I’m almost always going to strike back. But deep down, I know it’s true that love is what kills hate.
9. Ronald Reagan got Manhattan to “blow”—slang for cocaine—through the whole Iran-Contra scandal, which got the United States involved in the drug trade that brought crack to the hood so they could finance the Contras in Central America. In the worst years of the crack epidemic—the late eighties and early nineties—there were literally thousands of homicides annually in New York. So juxtaposing Reagan and bin Laden isn’t as crazy as it may seem. This is a piece of our recent history that people like to forget or pretend never happened so they can maintain some fantasy of American purity—which is why I thought it was important to include it in this rhyme. It’s that same sort of historical amnesia and myth of America’s innocence that led us into the war in Iraq. In my little way, I’m trying to kill that myth by reminding people of the truth—because that myth is a dangerous thing for the whole world.
10. “Mami” here flows from its opposite, “Papi,” a few lines before, and connects the end of the song to the opening when I say “I came to see the mamis in the spot.”
BLUE MAGIC / FEATURING PHARRELL
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1. The collision of two figures of speech—“flip,” meaning first to speak, and then to sel
l something for more than you bought it, and “birds,” meaning a kilo of coke—creates a third strangely poetic image of birds doing flips in the sky like some kind of hallucinogenic circus act.
2. 360 waves form a circular pattern, like stirring a pot, which is how you turn cocaine into off-white crack rocks (which is why it “comes back hard”).
3. In this line I pronounce wrists “wristses” to rhyme it with bitches. Twisting pronunciation to create rhymes works when the distortion feels witty, not desperate.
4. Commissary, the prison’s own system for doling out extras, is unnecessary for our crew because we have connections—“creole C.O. bitches” (C.O. = corrections officer)—who will bring them whatever “treats” they need.
5. This was the first single off of my American Gangster album, which was inspired by the movie about Frank Lucas and the rise of the drug game in the seventies and eighties in New York.
6. These next lines connect back to the lines about the eighties, which is when hip-hop culture first exploded, with b-boys breaking (spinning on their heads) and writers covering the cities in graffiti. But the eighties were also when hustling exploded, too, and I literally “hustled in the halls” of buildings, even though I never made history—for better or worse—like Frank Lucas.
7. P’s singing the hook he borrowed from En Vogue’s “Hold On” (don’t waste your time / fighting blind / minded thoughts / of despair), another eighties reference (okay, it was 1990, but very close).
8. 1987 was the year Eric B and Rakim released Paid in Full, a contender for the most influential hip-hop record of all time. This links up to the subtle Rakim reference at the end of the previous verse—I don’t write on the wall / write my name in the history books / hustling in the hall—which plays off of Rakim’s line from “My Melody” (off Paid in Full): whether playin ball / bobbing in the hall / or just writin my name / in graffiti on the wall.
9. This song is full of homonyms and synonyms—fishscale, contra, concert. I love the following quote because I made a conscious effort to use homonyms in this way, and someone actually noticed: “It testifies to Jay-Z’s lyrical ingenuity that even though we fully experience these poetic lines by ear rather than by eye, looking at them on the page calls attention to their individual effects, not just their cumulative impact. Equally as impressive as the homonym is that he delivers it while making a fairly complicated point, all while rhyming four lines together.” —Adam Bradley, The Book of Rhymes
10. Just like in the previous verse, the last line of one verse connects to the first line of this one—the previous verse’s last line was about how Reagan and Ollie North were hypocritically working hand-in-hand with hustlers to move drugs, the first line in this verse ends with “fuck Bush,” Reagan’s crooked-ass Republican heir. There’s also another homonym here—Bush as in George and bush as in pussy.
11. Hook/hook is another homonym—hook in the sense of getting caught, and hook in the sense of a chorus in a song. I wasn’t down with either.
12. I like the internal rhymes here. You’re waiting for me to finish the rhyme for Siamese, but I throw in twin/end and stand/man before I get there with knees. This is an unusual track—a minimalist beat with drum rolls and synthesizer chords—and I came up with a flow that could weave through it, which meant sometimes the lines breathed and other times the rhymes were more tightly wrapped.
THIS LIFE FOREVER
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1, I recorded this for the soundtrack of a film that never got made called Black Gangster, based on the Donald Goines novel.
2. This song is based on a real moment in my life. It was probably 1994 or 1995, the years before I released Reasonable Doubt, before I’d fully made a transition from one life to the next. I was riding in my white Lexus 300, a car that always caught people’s eyes when I’d park it outside of shows back then. Everyone at the club might have thought of me as an up-and-coming rapper who didn’t even have a deal yet, but the 300 made them think twice about who I really was.
3. That day, I was in the car with my nephews, who were teenagers then. I was listening to Donny Hathaway and moving slow, like ten miles an hour, just rolling around Fort Greene, Brooklyn. I was totally sober, but I felt my consciousness shifting. I looked around and suddenly everything was clear: girls younger than my nephews pushing babies in strollers, boys working the corners, old women wheeling wobbly shopping carts over cracked sidewalks. It was like a movie unfurling on my windshield with Donny Hathaway on the soundtrack. But it wasn’t a movie, it was my world. It fucked me up.
4. “Spark” has a double meaning: It can refer to lighting up a gun or lighting up a blunt. Either way, it’s an attempt to escape the harsh life.
5. The music was like a trapdoor from that claustrophobic life. Working in the streets could make you money, but as long as you were in that game, you were in those streets, connected to that life like you were chained.
6. I’m convinced that one of the reasons I struggled to get a record deal is that no one in the business really understood the core audience I reached.
7. These lyrics are in the first person but really they’re directed to other people. When I talk about myself here—flossing on off days and being unstoppable—it’s really meant as a boost to the cats who feel lost and depressed, “under God’s gray skies,” to understand that the only way out is to stay up and keep strong.
8. Socks and sweatpants are where you keep the money and the work when you’re hustling.
9. So many times people get caught up by the cops just when they’re about to get out of the game, or even after they’ve left it behind. Think about the movie Heat. It could’ve happened to me—it almost did.
10. The name of this song is “This Life Forever” and this is what it means to be “stuck in this life forever,” getting your weight up so you’re always ready for conflict, to kill or be killed, to be armed not just with a nine, but with a quicker mind than the people coming for you.
11. Wordplay around the concept of math: “subtract my life,” “mathematics is precise,” “carry the nine,” “just ain’t the answer,” “divided” by the years. Math is more than just numbers and equations, it’s a metaphor for knowledge of the deepest kind.
12. My pop taught me chess, but more than that, he taught me that life was like a giant chessboard where you had to be completely aware in the moment, but also thinking a few moves ahead. By the time he left, he’d already given me a lot of what I’d need to survive.
13. There were a lot of Brooklyn kids heading down to Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. in the mid-nineties, chasing new markets for crack. And a lot of them died.
14. These lines offer a series of double entendres related to chess: Rooks—or rookies—taken by the knight, meaning the long night of death; they lose their crown—or heads, their lives—trying to defend the queen, which could mean fighting over a woman, or defending someone more powerful, someone higher on the chain of command.
MEET THE PARENTS
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1. This song was on the Blueprint2: The Gift & the Curse album. But it’s also a song about the gift and the curse that lies at the heart of the parent-child relationship.
2. Structurally, I was influenced by the nonlinear way Tarantino laid out the story in Pulp Fiction. So the song begins with a send-off, a burial.
3. I made his afterlife the prologue to turn the story on its head in narrative terms but also to emphasize the consequences of abandonment, that by walking out on your babies, you’re burying them.
4. The kid who died was a “thug” but everything else in these lines tells you he was the kind of person who maintained his honor and was loved by the brothers he left behind.
5. At the graveside I introduce the single mother, Isis. I gave her an Egyptian goddess’s name because there’s a way we put black mothers on pedestals while at the same time saying they’re incapable of raising boys to men, which I basically say in this song. Even if I believed it when I recorded it,
I can say I don’t believe it now. There are too many men, myself included, whose lives are counterevidence to that idea.
6. Even when the men weren’t around us, their blood was pumping inside of us, their DNA programming our moves. No matter how far away we were from our fathers physically, we were biologically inseparable, genetically intertwined. And to the degree that biology and genes determine your fate, our destinies were irreversibly linked.
7. This is a recurring image in my songs, winter as a symbol of a desolate, difficult life. Maybe if I’d hustled in Southern California or Miami the image would have less of a hold on me, but when you hit the streets in the literal darkness and cold of winters on the East Coast, it reinforces your sense that the universe doesn’t care about you, that you’re on your own in a harsh world.