:: Track Listing

1. Intro
2. Pray
3. American Dreamin’
4. Hello Brooklyn 2.0
5. No Hook
6. Roc Boys (And the Winner is)…
7. Sweet
8. I Know
9. Party Life
10. Ignorant Shit
11. Say Hello
12. Success
13. Fallin’
14. Blue Magic
15. American Gangster

:: Record Review

Jay-Z

American Gangster
(Roc-A-Fella; 2007)

Rating: 87%
Combined Rating: 81%


When I reviewed Jay-Z's last record, last year's Kingdom Comeback, I said that it sucked. In this I was correct. It was a hard truth at the time, one that I reconciled roughly and pushed into words. A recent relisten verified for me how crystalline my recollection of it was. "Show Me What You Got" is still not a party track; "Minority Report" still says nothing. At the close of the review, I summed up all the frustration and rage a hip-hop nut would feel when their Favorite emcee flimsily abased expectations. I am not generally a fanboy, but I allow myself to buy into a few mythologies -- the Wu and the Boss, mainly, and Jigga blends my adoration for both and then reifies it with the astral strength of his charisma. He is my pop icon, and on Kingdom Come he took a shit on my heart. The resulting review accordingly reads like the shit's not even wiped off, all still tear-stained and indignant. It's some stirring, heartfelt stuff. You should really read it sometime.

But it's a lie: it was written in a moment of crestfallen abandon, and I completely neglected to see the flipside I'd always known and loved to Jay-Z, as connected to its flipside as one side of a piece of paper is to the other. This review is about that flipside. It is a very simple concept to grasp, and what makes my Kingdom Come review such a lie is that it implicitly acknowledges this concept and then outright rejects it. Here: Jay-Z makes great albums (Reasonable Doubt [1996], In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 [1997], The Blueprint [2001]) and he makes bad ones (The Blueprint 2 [2002], Best of Both Worlds [2002], Roc la Familia [2000]). What threw me off is that Jay accepts this as the nature of the artist, but that shouldn't really matter to the critic. Kingdom Come was just one of the shitty ones. American Gangster belongs to the other category.

Now, my reactions to this record will be personal. They will happen inside of my brain, yes -- the same brain that absorbs Jay's words and assimilates them into these dusty stacks of hip-hop memoranda -- but they will also happen in the very physical stomach from which I fart. I do not know how or why the concept of "Jay-Z, Superstar" and the concept of "Clayton Purdom, Schlub" fused permanently in my cerebellum, but I do know when it happened, or at least, roughly, the era: the dawn of this millennium, a time of great unrest. Puberty abounded. I'll spare the tawdry details. I'd loved other rappers before (Andre and Guru loomed large), and I've certainly loved others since (Lupe and Weezy, that's my heart), but my obsession with The Blueprint was something else; it affected me not as art, but as something interstitial. It was on some Carl Jung shit. As Jay rocketed up the socioeconomic ladder, I watched not with excitement or envy but with pride. I was doing that shit. Beyonce was diving off my boat. Each of Jay's acquisitions was met on my part with a feeling of assurance, the coolness that accompanies a smart business move. It continues. That husk Kingdom Come bottomed me out emotionally, physically, ontologically. If LeBron leaves my Cavs and goes to Jay's Nets -- which he will, call it -- I will be moving my wallet from one pocket to another.

I don't think Jay-Z knows that he is me, and that we are twain, and that I have just made my favorite album of the year, but I do know that he knows that he just made his favorite album of the year (which is also mine). What else could explain the confidence of these raps? What else could explain the lean way he devours these beats (each a feast), as hungry as he's sounded since he stopped rapping quick? Because as much as I love The Blueprint, I find it remarkable for how sated Jay sounded. It was the actualization of a specific idea about rap as a form of black entrepreneurialism. It is what uncheckered success sounds like. American Gangster is a sort of prequel to that record, in that it documents with an insect's eye the struggle for and potential costs of that success. Neither record tries to push hip-hop forward, but both stand as beacons, consummately validating what the genre can be through the colossal figure of Jay-Z and the all-consuming draw of his reminiscences. The difference is that when Jay looked back via The Blueprint, he found Al Green and family around the kitchen table; when he does so on American Gangster, he finds Ready to Die (1994) and cold street corners.

In so doing, Jay-Z has created an album equal to any other in his discography, and he has made me a happy motherfucker. He must've known something was up, felt a surge of electricity as I entered his brain to make the Jay-Z album that I wanted beyond want for him (us) to make for us (me). I can't not talk about it like this: American Gangster appeals so directly to my notions of what makes great rap great that it feels culled directly from the grey space of my record collection, laser-sculpted using a dense four-dimensional grid of data pulled from my iTunes. The sonic flow here makes logical room for the low-key burble of "Sweet" and the ephemeral shimmer of "I Know" as well as for showstopping showoffs like "Roc Boys" and "Success." It functions as both a new great Jay-Z album for everyone to love and a new great Jay-Z album for critics to study, and as both a critic and a begrudging part of everyone it speaks to the core of my ego-saddled quasi-literate rap-loving heart. Thus it represents an exegesis -- a validation of the form and a great record by this artist -- but it also (more astonishingly) represents an exodus.

Take it as a step-by-step illustration of how Sean Carter turned into J-Hova. American Gangster marks a pupal development from embryonic charisma through interstellar mic prowess, track by track, rap by rap, stop to stop on the El when I listen to this record and/or wrote the motherfucker on my heart. Let us look at the remarkable way this emceeing scales in intensity. On "Pray," the album's first and least impressive track, we find disarming honesty and little else: "As the girls start to giggle / I ask why you laugh / They say, 'You too little.'" A few tracks later, between long stupid Weezy warbles, Jay treats the Beastie Boys sample on "Hello Brooklyn" as a cat call, perfecting the track-length metaphor: "Hello Brooklyn, if we had a daughter / Guess what I'm-a call her? Brooklyn Carter / When I left you for Virginia / It didn't offend ya / (.) I love your corners, I'm half your soul." If nothing else, Jay's sense of home is approaching Wallace Stegner levels of complexity, commingling devotion with regret.

From here the fundamentals of emceeing are accepted as perfected, and we begin experimenting with applications of this skill. The first verse of "Roc Boys" is a clinic on subversive wit, such that the jubilance of the track finds ballast and poignancy: "First of all I wanna thank my connect / The most important person with all due respect / Thanks to the duffle bag, the brown paper bag / The Nike shoebox for holding all this cash / (.) Thanks to the pastor rapping at your eulogy / (.) And most important to you / The customer." My iPod sneezes. Shades of Hell Hath No Fury (2006): the glib malevolence, the self-consciousness of emcee-as-hustler, the implication of the listener, but the message now crystallized and probably actually played on MTV. On "Ignorant Shit" we find furious incisiveness again, but here delivered sans "character." This is explicit. This is some shit that no other rapper could get away with: "I missed the part when this stopped being about Imus / What do my lyrics got to do with this shit? / Scarface the movie did more than Scarface the rapper to me / Still that ain't the blame to all the shit that's happened to me / Are you saying what I'm spitting / Is worse than these celebritons showing they kittens? / Are you kidding? / Let's stop the bullshitting / Till we all without sin let's quit the pulpitting."

By this point in the record things have cohered to such a level that, immediately following that verse, when the track ends and the baleful strings of "Say Hello" begin their sinister sweep, and the monstrous hook begins tumbling over itself, it becomes clear that things have locked into place. This is the absolute A-game. This is the best music Jay-Z can make as a human -- at least by my (his) definitions of what he (we) can do. American Gangster documents the rise toward this height and then rapturously captures the view at the summit.

But continuing our theme of duality, this means that the album's success in the back end is a function of the relative failure of the front end. Thus we must admit a rift in our union. The "Intro" is a piffle that won't make it past anyone's second listen. Jay claimed on Charlie Rose that "Pray" is as important as any track he's ever recorded. I find it an instant b-side: the beat bores, the raps lack. The next two tracks build anticipation toward the record's bristling middle third and incendiary close, but do little besides build. But the steps I take toward the long good part are short, and we heal our fissures swiftly. Sublimated as I am by this record's closing masterspell I have lost my goddamn marbles. Goddamn: the period-specific News at 6 synthclaps of "Ignorant Shit," heroic guest spots from Beanie Sigel and "Google Earth Nas" (ha!), No I.D.'s silly ill organ loop and live drum clip on "Success" wherein we drop Supreme Clientele (2000)-worthy abstractions ("Bye bye my reply / Bla! Bla! / Blast burnin and pass burnin the ta ta"), the windswept beat for "Fallin'," which we bob and weave through, expertly letting the loop free for a nanosecond at a time before lassoing back on, the lo-fi doomsday pop of "Blue Magic" before --

Well, then there's "American Gangster," which, by all formal (read: my) criteria, is the best track Jay's ever recorded. Yes, there are more classic tracks throughout the discography -- "Girls, Girls, Girls" still titillates, and who wants to fuck with "Brooklyn's Finest" -- but there's really no precedent for the burst of second-by-second inspiration, the scintillating fusion of production and flow, on display here. This track can only come at the end. It can only be the title track. The only name more appropriate for a solipsistic fulfillment like this would be to self-title it even more, call it Jay-Z, or give it no name at all. This is soul music masquerading as hip-hop. Meaning hasn't been compressed into raps like this since the mid-90s, and only then in the finest records this genre has produced. All the themes of American Gangster and its lineage are here -- hip-hop, death, family, ambition, regret, worldliness, this whole picaresque saga -- and Jay-Z becomes an outline, a conduit, a silhouette engorged in flames. Again and again Jay demands on this track, beneath the hook and scattered through this starburst of sound, "I want the sky," which sounds fairly familiar, but never before has he sounded so close to holding it. Never before has the listener been taken by the hand and lead, step by step, to catch a glimpse of the infinite like this. Certainly art transcends -- hello, Lisbon (2006); hello, 2001; hello, "The Dead," hello to all the reasons I spend my time parsing this shit, hello to every time I've ever found for an instant the source of inspiration -- but not so often with this graded accessibility, and not so often in this genre, and not so much at all in 2007. It doesn't happen like this very often. I'd thank Hov, but I already know how welcome I am. Clayton Purdom :: 21 November 2007 |