If Jay-Z had his way back in , this list would be too brief to warrant compiling. But the industry had different plans. His catalogue contains some of the most potent imagery and lucid storytelling about poverty and the desperation that it breeds, all while dominating mainstream pop music, in a delicate tightrope act that almost no one else has ever been able to manage for the span of time that Jay has.
His merging of thinking-man street raps with commercial hits paved the way for artists like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole to do the same today. But as an adolescent, he put his hobby on the backburner and crack sales on the front. He followed that with the inconsistent, overly polished In My Lifetime, Vol.
From through , Jay was unstoppable. He released at least one project annually, while nurturing promising new talent like Philadelphia-based rappers Freeway and Beanie Sigel. With the help of brilliant music minds like Kanye West, Just Blaze, and the Neptunes, Jay dictated the course of hip-hop and emerged as a keen songwriter who knew exactly how to maximize the strengths of his collaborators.
He released his career-defining LP The Blueprint in and released the excellent retirement fake-out The Black Album just two years later. But Jay never really committed to his retirement. From on, he seemed hell-bent on proving that he still had what it took to keep the No. Every release from this period of his career had a strategic selling point, whether it was a marquee collaborator like R. These albums range from lyrically and musically progressive, to painfully awkward and unfocused. The expensive, No I.
A-sampling cut is a misguided attempt at celebrating stand-up women and shaming shady ones. The project was doomed, though, once a video that allegedly shows the Chicago singer having sex with and urinating on an underage girl began making the rounds — Jay wisely fell back from the project like Homer Simpson sinking into a bush.
The controversy seemed to be simmering down two years later despite 14 then-pending child-pornography charges against Kelly in Chicago and the two stars gave it another go.
Maurice White deserved better. The following year, Kelly was actually arrested in Miami after police found 12 images of a nude, underage girl in his Florida home. Those child-pornography charges were later dropped after a technicality deemed the photos inadmissible in court. But yeah, this song is okay, I guess. Singer K. Carter : From the music to the lyrics, this song feels limp. Aside from being a vehicle to showcase Amil, who already has two other appearances on this album, it really has no reason to exist.
And Mr. Even the titles are nearly identical, ugh. Musically, the sum is not greater than its parts. Blige—featuring track recorded to boost anticipation for their co-headlining Heart of the City tour that year. Carter : A passable Roc-A-Fella posse cut that feels more like a team-building exercise. The verses are choppy and the song is mostly bloated with soundbites from older material.
The song reeks of trendy pandering; the polychromatic music video, with its fish-eye camerawork, is a Top 10 corniest Hov moment. Kelly sings about trying to conjure the sexiest lyrics and music possible for this actual song, and Jay enables him by dropping eight bars of metaphors about waistlines and bass lines.
As the album played, attendees watched an outer-space light show, with shooting stars zipping across an overhead screen. Carter : Jay personifies diamonds to fit the plot of the cop comedy Blue Streak this song also appears on the soundtrack. But this cut seems more like cubic zirconia compared to harder Swizz-produced singles of the era i. Here he presents his unlikely success as a disruptive force, likening himself to Muhammad Ali and Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. How could you not root for this guy? Still, this beat is plodding, and the track slows the momentum of Vol. It approaches gimmicky ground when he introduces his own rap prospect, but J. Instead it became a stand-alone short that finds Hov announcing his partial ownership of the Brooklyn Nets.
There are some important messages about the struggle of being a black creative on here, mixed with ideas on acceptable Instagram etiquette, according to Shawn Corey Carter. Kelly express the confusion that comes with fake friends, both sounding conflicted. You can hear the latter here in references to Yasiin Bey a. The final draft retained some subliminal shots, but ultimately sounds like Hov is shadowboxing with himself.
Beanie Sigel and Jay-Z lend their support by splitting a verse. This is one of his more overt examples — over a dreary piano backdrop, he compares the plight of soldiers to that of street hustlers.
Blige sample. He boasts about his maturity, which entails everything from smoking Cuban cigars to maintaining an excellent credit score. Kelly and Jay-Z. On the track, Jay skims through his life story, from growing up without a father to sonning his rap competition. The two rappers, with their different yet harmonious approaches, conquer a bubbly curveball of a beat by Q-Tip. Carter : Ironically, Jay ended up in trouble with the law around the time of the release of this extended metaphor comparing his musical rise to a high-profile criminal trial.
Carter : The one-minute intro to this song shines brightest, as Jay makes clear just how comfortable he is with handling and using his gun. The song samples the theme music from its titular TV series, but Jay neglects to name-drop another Brooklyn-born hardass: the Honorable Judge Judy. Jay examines that repetition, mulling over the influence of his own criminal activities on the nephews who look up to him. Yet this hot-and-heavy track evokes a lazy, lovemaking vacay in a remote location, thanks to lustful songwriting, funky bass strings, and sleepy brass.
Jay singles out his ego, separating himself from the persona that led him to shoot his own brother as a young teen, or cheat on his wife. Dre, who recorded the original track, along for the ride.
The electric guitar-powered beat during the second half would sound at home on Vol. He returned home to a mess. Also, Nas had tried to lynch an effigy of his former rival at Summer Jam before being blocked by Hot Kelly, of all people, to sing about innocence. Shawn Carter plays hype man for his better half on this standout from Everything Is Love.
He goes at it for less than four minutes, but I could listen to Hov spit over this beat for hours. Here, he opens up about a close friend and fellow hustler who snitched once he got snagged by police.
Jay is a ghetto griot here, sharing a story about how a group of tenacious kids with big aspirations and limited options find themselves in the coke game. Ball till your days is up. The song ends in a place of peace, acceptance, and forgiveness.
Jay, Beans, and Bleek indulge their love for hot wheels over a thumping beat, saluting the road warriors and auto aficionados who know the real party goes down at the let out. DJ Toomp provides a stirring, cinematic backdrop — these two really should work together again. But music matchmaker DJ Khaled paired them up proper, allowing Hendrix to lay down an inescapable hook and Hov to spit cloth talk of only the highest thread count. And this final song on the collaborative album is a neat, bow-wrapped resolution that leaves the past in the past.
Over a crescendoing organ riff, the two rap legends grumble about the misfortunes that come along with being filthy rich. These horn flourishes and xylophone taps are the perfect sound-bed for a retelling of how a kid from Marcy Projects massively succeeded against all odds.
Jay is nervous, unsure, maybe even neurotic — a type of vulnerability previously unseen, a tip of the transparency iceberg that was to come. Blue Ivy is gonna be. The Marcy lyricists narrate scenarios that prove in the streets, wolves can take on many different forms. While Kanye rotates women and extols the merits of birth-control pills, Jay gives all glory to Gloria Carter, his mom. But the track is heavy-handed in its execution, an approach that Jay reveals was intentional in his book, Decoded.
The trio brings exactly that over this bouncy Rick Rock production — the best example of their gratifying synergy. But as his storied career proves, he could never definitively say good-bye to music. Jay-Z preys on cultural stereotypes to describe his many women and — perhaps most shamefully — reveals himself to be a viewer of sophomoric comedy flick Deuce Bigalow.
Still, the chipmunked Tom Brock sample is undeniable. Some of the bigger stories from his past are as follows: At 12, he shot and injured his brother who was addicted to crack a the time. He dealt drugs himself from the age of 16 to In the midst of his overwhelming surroundings, was rap and hip-hop to help him through.
He started rapping at around 9 years old, a gift, he said, that came easily to him. Also, some people just like the music. When asked what it was like growing up in the projects he used this analogy: crabs in a barrel. Rolling Stone writer Charles Holmes thinks otherwise , 15 years later writing that the retirement announcement was nothing more than a brilliant marketing move on the part of Jay-Z. Responding to similar claims at the time, that the retirement was never genuine, Jay-Z disagreed and said he could think of other ways to get attention.
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