by Jay-Z
11. In the projects, especially back in the eighties, things were so violent that you literally went to sleep to the sound of gunshots some nights. You grow up fast like that. The second meaning here is that Karma catches up to other guys—in the form of gunshots putting them to sleep—but not me, at least not so far. And I’m not going to let fear of death slow me down.
12. It’s always been most important for me to figure out “my space” rather than trying to check out what everyone else is up to, minute by minute. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself—and that’s essential for any artist, I think.
13. This is how it feels when you’re in the hood hanging out and then a Benz rounds the corner. You see the dude in the Benz and you feel a surge of something, maybe hope. The guy who hops out of the Benz is familiar—a normal guy, like you, in some ways—but he got out of that tight situation you’re still in. Where I’m from, that guy in the shining Benz was almost always a hustler, not a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. Seeing that level of success is powerful. The image tells a dramatic story and drew a lot of us into lives of crime. But the good thing about it is it also gave us all a kind of hunger for success that motivated us to do something more than just hold down the project benches.
14. There’s a double entendre here, but there’s more, too: In Greek mythology, a character named Icarus and his father, Daedalus, tried to escape from their imprisonment. Daedalus built two pairs of wax wings for himself and his son so they could fly to freedom. Before they took off, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun. But once Icarus got in the air, he forgot all about that and kept soaring higher and higher. He got too close to the sun, and his wax wings melted. He kept flapping his arms, but without wings he crashed into the sea, where he drowned. It’s a great story, but sometimes we have to ignore the lesson of it, especially those of us who come from backgrounds where there’s always someone telling you to quit or to keep a low profile. We can’t be afraid to fly—or to be fly—which means soaring not just past our fear of failure but also past our fear of success.
15. This is why we shouldn’t be afraid. There are two possibilities: One is that there’s more to life than the physical life, that our souls “will find an even higher place to dwell” when this life is over. If that’s true, there’s no reason to fear failure or death. The other possibility is that this life is all there is. And if that’s true, then we have to really live it—we have to take it for everything it has and “die enormous” instead of “living dormant,” as I said way back on “Can I Live.” Either way, fear is a waste of time.
16. In a way this captures the theme of my entire catalog—moments of triumph and success, the “winner’s cup,” intercut with dark, cold days, “winters” so severe they threatened my life.
17. This was also the chorus and last line of “Never Change” from The Blueprint album, whose opening lines capture the same sentiment—Hov summer or winter, Hov dead or alive.
18. This takes us back to one of the recurring questions I’ve been trying to figure out in my songs: How can we know what’s right, what’s wrong? You’re born into this world in a random way. There are no guides. So much depends on where you’re born and who your influences are. It’s like in the song “Regrets” where the young kid is in search of higher learning turning in every direction seeking direction but doesn’t find any. People give you books—the Bible, the Qu’ran—but they don’t define you. All of the directional language in this verse: compass, map, look, guide, in the end point the listener inside, toward their own hearts.
19. A series of wordplays—pro’s and prose; cents and scents—bring the song to its finish. Even though I’ve just said that it’s your heart that defines you, I’m still trying to give this unborn child something more than that: a blueprint for life. A map, a guide, a scent to follow.
LUCIFER
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1. Kanye brought me this amazing track. The hook— I’m gonna chase you out of earth / Lucifer, Lucifer, son of the morning—comes from a classic roots-reggae joint from Max Romeo called “I Chase the Devil.” Lucifer is a figure in the Old Testament book of Isaiah: “How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” Interestingly, he’s never directly identified as the devil in the Bible, just a fallen angel. I don’t believe in the devil myself, or at least not in the guy with horns and a pitchfork. But I do believe we all have the potential for evil inside of us, which is very real.
2. This is another conversation with God, which is, as always, also a conversation with myself, trying to make some kind of ethical sense of my own choices.
3. If there is a justification for murder, it’s that your own life is threatened. It seems obvious, but it raises questions: When can you be sure that the only way out is preemptive murder? Is violence the only way to prevent violence? Is murder ever a good answer? Even if you save your life, what about your soul?
4. I’m repeating the Lord’s own words to him because he “said it better than all”: If he can allow himself to take vengeance, then why can’t I?
5. The “best boy” I’m referring to here is Biggie. This is actually a song about his death and the way it destroyed my sense of a just universe. Here’s the thing about Big: when you got past all the grotesqueries in his lyrics, all the Richard Pryor comic exaggerations, he was one of the most decent, peaceful guys I knew. One night back in ’96, maybe, we were hanging out together at Daddy’s House, the studio that Bad Boy Records owned, and I played him “Streets Is Watching,” a song I’d just finished for my second album. He played it twenty times in a row and gave me a sideways look: “Is the whole album going to sound like this?” He loved me, but at the end of the day, we’re all MCs, all competing. He was mad that the song was so good, but happy for me at the same time. He had already started work on his own second album—he played “Hypnotize,” “Downfall,” and a few other songs for me that night. I was mad but happy, too. Anyway, we left the studio and had dinner with a couple of friends—Ty-Ty and D-Rock—and then we headed out to a club, maybe Mirage or Exit or Carbon, one of the hot clubs at the time in Manhattan. We pulled up to the club and saw some niggas out front who we knew had some problems with Big, crazy guys, the kind who would be happy to shoot up the club just to settle some tired beef or just for the fuck of it or to improve their reputation. Big looked at me and told me straight up: “I’m not going in there.” I was young and dumb, and my ego wouldn’t let me drive away. I thought Big was scared. I told Ty-Ty, Fuck it, we’re going in. And we did. But Big wasn’t playing. He pulled right away from that club and went the fuck home. He wasn’t scared; he just didn’t want to waste his time with that kind of bullshit. He had bigger goals and wasn’t going to get derailed on some silly shit. He had started on the streets but developed greater insight and clarity about the futility and wastefulness of that kind of petty violence. For someone like that to get shot and killed the way he did tore me up. The whole Tupac beef was so pointless. Big just tried to avoid the whole thing. He never did anything wrong in that situation. His death was so senseless, so wrong, that it drove me crazy with rage and sadness.
6. Brown Sugar was a movie starring the fly Sanaa Lathan (and based in part on the life of my collaborator dream hampton, coincidentally).
7. I’m in Los Angeles because that’s where Big was murdered.
8. Although evangelist shares a bar with and picks up the rhyme from Los Angeles, it’s actually the beginning of the sentence that continues in the next bar, or after the line break when you read it in print. The sentence is: Like an evangelist I can introduce you to your maker. But when you hear it it sounds like In Los Angeles, like an evangelist. But what could that possibly mean? It plants something strange in the middle of the song and adds weight to those words Los Angeles and evangelist, even if they’re out of context. I like playing with the line breaks like that to create strange lyrical effects.
9. Being reduced to ashes bring
s you “closer to nature” by returning you to the dust, which is also another indirect biblical echo.
10. They need to hope their debts are paid up and they’re all square with whatever god they worship, because it’s over. I’ve played a lot with the language of the threat in my songs—I even have a whole song called “Threats”—but in this song, there’s something more sinister about the threat, something more serious, which is partially conveyed by the use of biblical and religious imagery.
11. The “I’m coming” is another near-religious phrase. It implies that I’m not just plotting and planning to get you and you can maybe plot and plan to escape. This is serious. You killed my nigga. I’m coming like a force of nature, or even something supernatural, something you can’t oppose or prevent, because my cause is righteous and my intent is pure. All you can do is make sure your casket’s picked out and you’ve gotten right with God because death is inevitable. It’s a dark sentiment, but that’s how revenge can feel, like it’s so right and just can’t be stopped. It’s the perfect feeling for this song.
12. The lines here are staggered and the references come in a fusillade. The bullets in the Koch automatic spray, and the holy water you get wet with is your own blood. A sabbatical is one way to refer to taking a break, so is “taking six”—but the break I’m talking about is permanent: you’ll “cease to exist.” Take Six is also the name of an a cappella gospel group—another religious reference—whose big hit was “Spread Love.” I used to freestyle over that song when I toured with Big Daddy Kane as a teenager, the a cappella rhythms they created with their voices were like a harmonic human beat box.
13. Another staggered line. The previous line’s emphatic church ties to this line’s reference to Don Bishop, the pimp/pastor whose catchphrase is chuuuurch!
14. At your funeral, of course.
15. This connects back to the first line in the verse where I mention “Brown Sugar” by D’Angelo; “Devil’s Pie” was another song by D’Angelo from his Voodoo album. That song starts off fuck the slice want the pie / why ask why till we fry. This verse is like a Devil’s Pie, a complete indulgence in evil thoughts.
16. I’m now talking about Biggs’s brother, Bobalob. We called him that because of his ball skills. He could jump really high so they threw him an alley oop or lob passes a lot.
17. This last verse is more autobiographical. I’m no longer the killing machine of the first two verses, now I’m just someone suffering through the loss of a friend, dreaming of revenge but waking up with just sadness.
18. Bob was driving a car in the Bronx when he was shot—the car crashed after the bullets connected.
19. This series of reverses is a more honest account about how I’m thinking about the deaths of these two friends. Revenge as a fantasy feels glorious in a dark way, but doesn’t solve the real problem, which is that they’re gone. The only thing that would bring them back is this impossible prayer to reverse time.
20. Just as I started the song with a prayer—Lord forgive him—I’m ending it with one. The first prayer asks for forgiveness for an act of murder; the last asks God to forgive the victim of a murder and make a way for him through the proverbial pearly gates of the afterlife.
21. I believe that intentions are a form of reality. Even having that idea of murderous revenge in your heart is dangerous.
22. Why do people trip over into the dark side, into murder and vengeance? It’s not the “Devil.” It could stem from all kinds of things: abandonment, deprivation, the loss of a loved one. All those things can make you question your faith in the universe or in the idea of a just God. But that evil inside is something we all have to find a way to deal with, or it’ll take us over.
23. Some people have used this song as evidence that I worship the devil, which is another chapter for the big book of stupid. It’s really just laughable. But the sad part is that it’s not even remotely a song about devil worship! It’s a song about the intersection of some basic human emotions, the place where sadness meets rage, where our need to mourn meets our lust for justice, where our faith meets our inclination to take matters into our own hands, like karmic vigilantes. People who hear the word Lucifer and start making accusations are just robbing themselves of an opportunity to get in touch with something deeper than that, something inside their own souls.
DECEMBER 4TH
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1. My mother actually narrated these stories on the record. She’s got a beautiful voice, like Maya Angelou or something.
2. It’s like the line from the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” (which Janet Jackson and Q-Tip sampled), you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.
3. A reference to Biggie’s line in “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)”: My sycamore style, more sicker than yours.
4. I didn’t give her pain in childbirth, but I made up for it later. My mother didn’t talk about it a lot, but she was scared for me when I really hit the streets. At the same time, she knew I had to figure some things out for myself.
5. My behavior was purposeful, but it was never my purpose to cause her pain.
6. I’m making the point here that poverty, as bad as it is, was one reason why I ended up hustling, but there were deeper reasons, demons that I had stemming from abandonment.
7. The sample that Just Blaze used for this track is a song from the Chi-Lites, a seventies soul group in my parents’ collection. The sample includes an ad lib from that song: What’s wrong, you look like you lost your best friend, is it something that I’ve done again?
8. This is a reference to “Insane in the Brain,” by Cypress Hill.
9. Now the shit matches my shirt.
10. The money isn’t just about money. It’s about finding a sense of worth in the world—after you’ve been told you’re worthless. Status—and self-esteem—are really what the money buys you.
11. I would hit my mother with cash and tell her I picked it up from shows I was doing—a transparent lie since Jaz and I weren’t exactly raking in big money for performing back then.
12. Of course, ’96 was the year Reasonable Doubt came out, and more importantly for this song, it was the year that my rapping stopped coming “second to me moving this crack.”
13. This is a song that strips all the glamour out of the drug game. The best thing I say about it is that it was a source of adrenaline and “spoils,” which is a word with two opposite meanings, of course: Spoils can be a reward, but the word itself implies that the reward is tainted, spoiled, by what you have to do to get it.
14. A “drop” is a convertible, which makes you easy to touch.
15. The first and the fifteenth are the days when government checks went out, and the fiends would rush drug dealers to get fixed, blow their whole check on a weekend of smoke.
16. I keep one eye open / like CBS—this is a line from “Can I Live.”
17. A drought is when your drug supply runs low. That’s when you really find out who you are in the streets, because you have to figure out some way to survive it. It’s also when things can get especially hectic and violent—in “Public Service Announcement,” on the same album, I make the point: I get my / by any means on / whenever there’s a drought / get your umbrellas out / because that’s when I brain storm.
18. This is the sort of dramatic touch that you might see in a movie and think it’s over the top, but this kind of thing really did happen, literally in the case of a famous gangster named Rich Porter. There was a high level of threat in the drug game, a high degree of ruthlessness and brutality, and, at its worst, it could reach this level, where your moms is getting your body parts in the mail.
19. I’m not talking strictly romantically here—I’m talking about all the women who were in the game with me, who transported drugs and money, opened towns, and made connects.
20. This line resolves one of the central contradictions in my thinking about my life. I always felt like I kept my eyes a little bit more wide open than other people aro
und me did—not that I was smarter, but that I saw some things very clearly. I wasn’t blind to the damage that I was causing myself and other people when I was in the game. I wasn’t deluded about the fact that my motivations went beyond satisfying my basic material needs—that I also loved the excitement and the status of that life. I’ll never say that, in the end, I got into the game because I wanted it; it was the life I chose. On the other hand, I chose it in part because I didn’t have a lot of other choices. I was born into a community that this country was trying to make disappear; was born at a time when drugs and guns were everywhere and jobs and education were much harder to find. In that sense, it was a life that chose me, a life I never would’ve pursued if I’d been born in different circumstances. But ultimately, the point of this song is that I don’t blame anyone, I’m just trying to explain myself, tell you why I’m this way. It’s my story, and I’m willing to own it.
HISTORY / FEATURING CEE-LO
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1. I wrote this song after President Obama won the 2008 presidential election and performed it at one of the inaugural balls. It’s a song like “I Know” and some other songs I’ve done, in that it’s a sustained metaphor that I never break. It’s a song that talks about victory and success and history in the largest, communal sense, but it does it, like most of my songs, through metaphors and deeply personal storytelling. It’s a song that came out of the same ambition I had when I started: to use the specific stories of my life and the world I grew up in to tell the broadest story possible about what it means to be alive.