Jay-Z Deconstructs Himself

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: November 22, 2010

In the summer of 1978, when he was 9 years old and growing up in the Marcy housing projects in Brooklyn, Shawn Carter — a k a Jay-Z — saw a circle of people gathered around a kid named Slate, who was “rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time — 30 minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps” of the folks around him, transformed “like the church ladies touched by the spirit.” Young Shawn felt gravity working on him, “like a planet pulled into orbit by a star”: he went home that night and started writing his own rhymes in a notebook and studying the dictionary.

 A Zaeh

Jay-Z

 

 

 

DECODED

By Jay-Z

Illustrated. 317 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $35.

 

 

“Everywhere I went I’d write,” Jay-Z recalls in his compelling new book, “Decoded.” “If I was crossing a street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I’d break out my binder, spread it on a mailbox or lamppost and write the rhyme before I crossed the street.” If he didn’t have his notebook with him, he’d run to “the corner store, buy something, then find a pen to write it on the back of the brown paper bag.” That became impractical when he was a teenager, working streets up and down the eastern corridor, selling crack, and he says he began to work on memorizing, creating “little corners in my head where I stored rhymes.”

In time, that love of words would give Jay-Z more No. 1 albums than Elvis and fuel the realization of his boyhood dream: becoming, as he wrote in one of his earliest lyrics, the poet with “rhymes so provocative” that he was the “key in the lock” — “the king of hip-hop.”

Part autobiography, part lavishly illustrated commentary on the author’s own work, “Decoded” gives the reader a harrowing portrait of the rough worlds Jay-Z navigated in his youth, while at the same time deconstructing his lyrics, in much the way that Stephen Sondheim does in his new book, “Finishing the Hat.”

“Decoded” is less a conventional memoir or artistic manifesto than an elliptical, puzzlelike collage: amid the photo-sharp reminiscences, there are impassioned music history lessons that place rap in a social and political context; enthusiastic shout-outs to the Notorious B.I.G. and Lauryn Hill; remedial lessons in street slang (“cheese” and “cheddar,” the casual hip-hop tourist will learn, translate into “money”); and personal asides about the exhaustingly competitive nature of rap and the similarities between rap and boxing, and boxing and hustling drugs.

At the same time, “Decoded” is a book that highlights the richly layered, metaphoric nature of the author’s own rhymes (even those about guns and girls and bling often turn out to have hidden meanings, stashed like “Easter eggs” in the weeds) — a book that underscores how the pressures of Jay-Z’s former life as a dealer honed his gifts as a writer, including a survivor’s appraising sense of character, an observer’s eye for detail and a hustler’s penchant for wordplay and control.

Jay-Z has mythologized his life before, of course — many of his most resonant lyrics, particularly those on his autobiographical masterpiece, “The Black Album,” are works of willful self-dramatization. And the basic outlines of his Horatio Alger story are well known: his childhood in Bed-Stuy during the crack epidemic; his father’s departure from the family, leaving him “a kid torn apart”; his career as a dealer, “tryin’ to come up/in the game and add a couple of dollar signs to my name”; his debut album, “Reasonable Doubt,” in 1996 (by which time, he has said, he “was the oldest 26-year-old you ever wanted to meet”); his ascent as a rap star, followed by his success as a producer, an entrepreneur and a chief executive (“I’m not a businessman/I’m a business, man.”)

Confidence is hardly in short supply for Jay-Z. This is the writer, after all, whose nickname is Hova (as in Jay-Hova), the rapper who has boasted of being “Michael Magic and Bird all rolled in one,” the “Sinatra of my day.” But Jay-Z writes here that he’s also tried, in his lyrics, to address emotions that “young men don’t normally talk about with each other: regret, longing, fear and even self-reproach,” and there are passages in this volume where the reader catches glimpses of the complicated, earnest artist behind the swaggering persona.

As in the lyrics, such passages are often half-hidden. His father’s abandonment and the harsh code of the streets made Jay-Z, in his words, “a guarded person” — wary of feeling or exposing too much, and practiced in the art of detachment. And affecting moments of vulnerability (seeing his father many years later, he writes, was “like looking in a mirror,” and it “made me wonder how someone could abandon a child who looked just like him”) are stashed in footnotes, or scattered amid unsettling scenes from the author’s past, growing up in the projects when “teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers,” and dealing “crack to addicts who were killing themselves, collecting the wrinkled bills they got from God knows where, and making sure they got their rocks to smoke.”

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