The 30 Best Displays of JAŸ-Z’s Lyricism
Reasonable Doubt turned thirty this past June, and the name on the streaming services now carries an umlaut. Three decades in, Shawn Carter is the best writer rap ever produced.
Thirty summers ago, a Roc-A-Fella pressing introduced a twenty-six-year-old Marcy dealer who swore it was just something he did on the side. Reasonable Doubt sold quietly and gradually became a classic, and this June, the man responsible for it celebrated his thirtieth birthday by adding an umlaut to his name. JAŸ-Z has been getting evaluated by the sales, the companies, the mythology, and the verses that built all three, while the words that built them have been treated as background music. This list stays on the page. Thirty songs, unranked, the numbers numbering and that’s all, each one here for what that dude said on it, the story machinery, the ass-whipping skill, the internal rhyme, the admissions thrown in without repercussion. The hits took care of themselves.
1. “D’Evils”
Two boys from the same Marcy hallways stayed up at slumber parties, then break the corners when the work came. In “D’Evils” JAŸ-Z takes that relationship to the meanest possible extreme, and it is the most sinister story he ever told. He says he stopped praying for forgiveness in that upward climb, he started asking forgiveness from Gotti. DJ Premier takes the chorus from looted vocalizations, Prodigy from fear of the illuminati (“I Shot Ya Remix”) and Snoop from imploring the divine (“Lil’ Ghetto Boy”); it is under this that he begins his work. A friend has gotten piss rich and skipped town, so our narrator, walking out of their house, snatches the man’s baby-momma, fist making contact with her collar and talking her bills, up to fifty dollar bills when she starts to choke on the small stuff, paying until her story has a post code. He himself drinks the sleeping memory away from the sleep-over, a good-night song turned warning; now he plans to shake the old friend’s girl until she sleeps forever. Her tears reveal to him the man’s trepidation, and he responds to them with the vow, that in due course, he will rid her of her pains and make them his.
2. “Dead Presidents II”
One version of “Dead Presidents” already existed in the world when JAŸ-Z dissected his over the same Ski beat, Lonnie Liston Smith’s subtle, summery piano sitting under Nas’s sampled voice from “The World Is Yours (Tip Mix)” that stalked the sum of dead presidents on the hook, and in the second run a pair of icy pens that was, for once, fixed for good. Surgeons talk about blood the way he talks about money here, numberless and flat. The braggadocio that endures every anthologizing has him living off last decade’s earnings, a hobby added on at the end of a sum that was hardly in need of one, and he ribs his home city in the process: a half-hearted jab at New York’s cowardice the day Snoop arrived. He crams threats into drawbacks, thought into flexes, and spends a dozen bars defining the face-value of those figures.
3. “Can I Live”
The Squares couldn’t understand why anyone would ever choose a corner over making a living, but JAŸ-Z clears things up for them in his verse to “Can I Live,” rapping over Irv Gotti’s remix of Isaac Hayes with someone who finally got his chance to speak after so many years of description. Hustling, he says, comes from hopelessness, and his posse became just as addicted to the lifestyle as their clients were addicted to the product. His verse is all about the pressure. He reveals the gamble underlying it all in blunt terms—a huge risk over the security of a small safe life – and describes his own hustle in terms of butter for bread that other men will be toasting—with the toast implying exactly what the hustler understands by it.
4. “Politics as Usual”
On December of 1985 a young boy tells his parents he’ll be home shortly. In the tenth year from now, the narrator of “Politics As Usual” comes to confess that the task was never completed, and is still connected to the underworld ten years from that point, and JAŸ-Z puts the entire narrative into a relaxed, luxurious monologue to the loop of the Stylistics. He calculates the cost of the bruised skin into each boast. The one romanticizing the work gets disillusioned quickly; he swears that all the hustle is basically him driving to get out of his own troubles. The merchandise remains in period and humble proportions, just like the VCRs, the giant Magnavox set, and the vintage wine for drinking along. Yet the loneliest claim on this track is sociological - there is no one feeling proud of his success, but plenty lining up in order to feel his pain. From a low leather seat, he declares himself to be the best there ever was, and adds one more double entendre to the financial language - his sentences have money value either way, both written and literal.
5. “22 Two’s”
In some smoky club there is a hostess calming the audience, shouting out at those unruly tables, telling them that the performance is going to be worth their manners. She then brings on JAŸ-Z, who devotes an entire verse to his too, two and to. And he uses the joke to carry the message. Each too has its own object. The most offensive goes to the New York rappers trying to be friendly with the West Coast (“Too much West Coast dick lickin’”), but the rest can be found among imaginary friends, company that is harmful and the business that is draining him, complaints which every hustler in the club would agree with. The number twenty-two is never strayed from. One bit of advice the hostess of Mary Davis gave was that bad manners make it harder for a hustler to make money; he shows all twenty-two examples.
6. “Bring It On” feat. Big Jaz & Sauce Money
The guy who taught him to rap is present. Years after “Hawaiian Sophie,” with the student now signing the checks, JAŸ-Z lined up his mentor Big Jaz and Marcy running mate Sauce Money on one DJ Premier beat, then had to out-write both of them in front of company. He is under strain. He positions himself right out of gangster movies, mimicking a young De Niro’s behavior, running his business like a pharaoh’s court, grading a competitor in wholesaler’s units, himself a full kilo, the other guy an eighth of that. He also lets the films get personal, saying he had to turn away when Tony killed Manolo, mixed emotions and all, then dealing with a would-be hard guy the way Benny Blanco treated Bobby Johnson, two pictures merged into one dismissal. He maintains even the gunplay in character, pistols set horizontally like a shot he is directing himself. Sauce Money boasts about creating idioms for money, and the three of them spend all the session attempting to grab food from one another.
7. “A Million and One Questions / Rhyme No More”
Old block colleagues, label doubters, and reporters all carried the same survey by 1997. On “A Million and One Questions,” JAŸ-Z sides with the table and acts his own questioner following a spoken shrug that he was never a rapper, only a hustler who happens to know how. The questions he writes are more brutal than anything they really posed. The questions range from money to murder suspicions, from whether he actually slept beside a tech through an old dispute, from whether a folded Roc-A-Fella signals once more eight for an ounce. Strangers first praise the watch, then inquire whether the location from “Friend or Foe” is real and on what street it is said to be. He vows to cover everything, poses the only query he has—how eagerly do they wish to know—and the interview concludes on a gunshot. Once he is gone and mouths to feed until the flowers come and women weep over his cold cheek like he was Cochise, DJ Premier swaps the beat below and substitutes deposition for eulogy rehearsal since he believes rappers cannot rhyme about crime.
8. “Where I’m From”
News vans missed his block even as the shooting remained constant, so on “Where I’m From,” JAY-Z testifies to all they missed from within Marcy, and every detail serves as a survival manual. The guidelines are unrelenting. Work enters the can as the blue vans swing the corner. The vest never gets put away on a promise of tomorrow; the day after, somebody is saying he was just with him yesterday. Eighteen sees wills drafted. For leaping out of vans and spraying, cops are called the A-Team. With its members praying so long they converted an atheist and a man seated an ounce away from needing a triple beam yet weighing product on a portable scale, the neighborhood church is the flakiest around. He drops in one piece of neighborhood reporting, the daylong argument over the best MC, Biggie, JAŸ-Z, or Nas, his own name lodged there like local geology. God may smite him, he adds, should any of it be false; then he questions whether anyone pardons males who live just as he does, the vest still on.
9. “Streets Is Watching”
Broken males in his orbit would benefit more from the name and the notoriety linked to accepting it; their utility for his money is none. Prices for twenty-five across “Streets Is Watching,” fear and flex in the same breath. Shooting a competitor only serves to lose his mind; catching a bullet from one offers the shooter a job. Not murdering people, he says, is now a full-time job. Ignoring meat is the quickest way to get extorted, but rivals aren’t worth his shells; they are only good for damaging his sales, the kind that start something then run to the cops; he would rather be on tour collecting a hundred a pop. The co-defendant years sit further back, him and his money inseparable, twenty-four-hour shifts till employees’ mouths sprang sluggish leaks and the boss lurked behind his own payroll. Families affected by his chaos get a public apology before the decision explaining the career, then he wonders why he should take a chance when he may set the offenses in rhythm and let the audience feel it.
10. “Imaginary Players”
On the sidewalk, a fake big shot is evaluated piece by piece: the lost Hummer, the missing ice, and a flung-work narrative never matching the man telling it. “Imaginary Players” sees JAŸ-Z running New York’s harshest diamond over a René & Angela sample, the meanest New York diamond, and every insult comes with a price tag. Money comes arranged into varieties. Competitors have beer money. His remains the entire year, the sort of connection waves through without counting, and bail money should trouble strike. Their single at ninety-nine cents, his at four dollars, the sales gap also has a number. Like a tailor with a straight razor, he provides corrections; no platinum in those Cartiers; therefore change the frame; no manicurist on the jet; hence, change the plane. The spoken ending stages the act at street level, a pretender in a 4.0 pulling up beside his 4.6 and asking the difference; the answer comes in dollars, thirty to forty grand, chased with a question about whether the cheaper truck even has leather.
11. “Friend or Foe ‘98”
Back on “Friend or Foe,” an out-of-town dealer got a favor and a warning. Ignoring the warning, he kept the favor and turned back up; therefore, JAŸ-Z produced the sequel as a debt collection over DJ Premier, a full crime film in one verse, nothing lost. One shot to the ceiling rouses the target. The sleeper sweats in bed looking for what caused this until the light bulb turns on and the reintroduction is quick; the one who said never come around here again now gathers and rises, gets waved back down. Almost softly, sympathy has covered the first visit; vengeance is a possibility explored and dismissed. He entered past everything, thugs in nearby rooms like cowboys at high noon, the receptionist paid off, the Lexus seen, guys stationed across a two-hotel town. He praises the ambush budget, wonders if a gun in his face is truly all the man came up with, puts one in the abdomen, calls for two ice cubes, and sends the dying man off with kind words to convey to B.I.G.
12. “You Must Love Me”
Everybody he apologies to had already forgiven him; he just cannot get over it. While JAŸ-Z pays three obligations—mother, brother, a lady who loved him—Kelly Price pleads the title on the hook; every confession is at the scene of the crime. The debt to his mother holds the ugliest line he ever said about himself, that after the pilfered purse change and the courthouse benches he sold her crack. She is not at fault, he says, telling her to play this back as he gets to the apology he still owes. The brother verse ranges from missing rings to the gun to the steps, him hoping his brother would call the bluff, then he shut his young eyes and squeezed. His brother stumbles; he dashes to Jaz’s house, alien to himself; the brother still begs to see him at the hospital, love without better reason. Until one risky week when avarice spoke, and he coached her across his work, the last apology goes to a woman he vowed to keep out of the game.
13. “Meet the Parents”
Rain over a graveyard, a gathering too often, mourners rushing over the same disbelief on every young casket, gone already and so young. From that funeral, JAŸ-Z backs up the tale a generation, telling “Meet the Parents” in the third person and saving the twist until the last feasible bars. Isis raised the boy by herself. She chose Mike, the around-the-way tough guy she observed fighting from a window, over Shy, the quiet one with rural aspirations; Mike saw his kid once as an infant and rejected him for being dark, mother’s baby, poppa’s maybe. The streets raised what he left; the youngster trusted the pistol in his waistline. Seventeen years later, Mike sends a mean-mugging youngster off his strip. The child first draws, plainly has the drop, then stops at a face like his own in a mirror, older, and interprets it as a sign from God. The man who never once considered him does not now either, six shots into his own son.
14. “So Ghetto”
A woman in the front seat offers at mid-ride the rich man driving at last drop the du-rag. He makes a U-turn and brings her back to the club, and the rest of “So Ghetto” comes off the same wrist; JAŸ-Z got back with DJ Premier at D&D, and the rhyme work behind the attitude shows more than the attitude lets on. Half the violence shows up as humor. He warns a corner-stander that the cape does no good, promises the man a long stretch in a black suit, then scripts the priest for the funeral, a eulogy insisting the deceased harmed no one and got shot by those boys anyway. Bentley Coupes are classified under simple fact rather than showing off. He takes the word literally when a magazine refers to him as shallow, then notes that they keep him on the cover anyhow since he makes money for them, therefore forecasting the turn when he sells too much. He never learned to swim. He sees guns at the Grammys and bottles exploding on the White House grass and still refers to himself as the same old Shawn either way.
15. “This Can’t Be Life”
Everything around him was growing in 1994. Biggie and Mack released their debut, Illmatic taking over the streets, the West locked in, and he was still extending work on a block, declaring himself a failure. On “This Can’t Be Life,” JAŸ-Z returns to that valley over an early Kanye West beat, trading lines with Beanie Sigel and Scarface and noting the worst year of his life at the same temperature as everything else. He offers himself two potential conclusions: arms across iron cuffs or stuffed with embalming fluid, his mother sobbing between them into her hands. Inside her Buick live the .38 longs. Then the year gets worse; his girlfriend’s water breaks and the baby comes out stillborn, his heart torn, life gone from her womb, and the only comfort he can give is that if it was meant to be, it will be soon. The hook begs repeatedly that there has to be more than this. Walking into the studio with a verse already prepared, Scarface answers a phone call about his buddy Reek’s deceased kid and raps about that instead.
16. “Intro” (The Dynasty: Roc La Familia)
First comes the name, boss first, list next, and then comes the roll call and the boss starts spitting. The opening verse of The Dynasty finds JAŸ-Z restating the reason the entire empire revolves around him, Just Blaze producing the myth from household items. Sopranos theme sets his days to tune, and he plays the mental piano on the key of his life, and he sees the world the way Stevie Wonder saw it with beads under the do-rag, intuition compensating for poor eyesight. Survival is depicted as car repairs; a blowout on the highway of life is dealt with by changing to the spare tire. The memory behind it all is a teenager sitting on the benches, turning green at any mention of someone like Enus; he in the trenches while Enus had an adventurous time spending without caring about prices. He went through freezing weather conditions without a hero nor a father figure and leaves him alone, cold and lonely, taking notes.
17. “Where Have You Been”
In a project hallway, a kid waits for his father on a bench, promising that he will be there, and the day passes by. On “Where Have You Been,” JAŸ-Z takes down years of cool accumulated by a kid sitting on that very bench and shares the confession with Beanie Sigel, and neither man tidies up after himself. Every desire in the verse goes for the same man. He desired to walk like him, talk like him, drink Miller nips and smoke Newports like him, and it came to fruition in a crooked way; now he is going to court like him. Childhood justification, daddy loved me and will never leave me, is said and struck down by an adult version of the same man. Beanie’s portion of confession goes into something even darker; a kid thrown out of the house for resembling his father, a number nine pressed into a small hand like a christening gift. JAŸ-Z closes with the most delicate questions, whether the man even remembers that December is his birthday, whether he remembers the delicate kid he turned into a heartless man.
18. “Renegade”
The critics maintained a one-line biography on him; jewels and nothing else, and one write-up spoiled his entire day. Over Eminem’s beats JAŸ-Z conducts the most elaborate self-defence he ever conducted on “Renegade.” He starts with a question whether the fools even listen to music or just skip it and claims the ghetto they destroyed as his inspiration, the dude they gave nothing making something despite it. He walks his listeners through the blocks of robberies being bungled and grown men living with their mothers, past the lady knocked down by some clown who vanished after paying child support, a fact he reminds you to note. How does he expect to grade music thugs with nothing to relate to when he helps them with it and you never could. The autobiography seals it; back against the wall, ashy knuckles, pocket full of lint, no money, iron under coat in bodega, a demeanor thirty years older, a childhood spent raising nothing but green. He reached the fork in the road and drove straight.
19. “Takeover”
During Summer Jam 2001, mid-verse, a childhood picture of his rival appears on the giant screen (poor Prodigy), and the audience sees the proof right between bars. JAŸ-Z turns all that hatred into prosecution against Kanye West’s reworking of the Doors, and it is petty, funny and utterly airtight. Four studio albums in ten years get divided during the song: two due, one no, one Illmatic, a hot album every ten years on average. Catalog audit comes next; a spark at the start became trash, from top ten to no mentions at all, guest verse by a bodyguard rated higher than his own. The street biography claims his target observed his life from the folks’ place and wrote it down into a notebook; Tec showed it to Nas on his tour, turning up later on a dresser in a song. Even the sampling gets disputed; the borrowed voice was used wrongly, one hot line made into one hot song, and he knows exactly who got paid. A wise man told him not to argue with fools; from a distance, it is hard to say who is who.
20. “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)”
The breakup of the Fat Boys leads the chart of his grievances, and any fresh hurt lines up behind it; the breakup of the Fugees, Richard Pryor burning down, Ike and Tina divorcing—all of it alongside the mornings JAŸ-Z wakes to find another dude with a problem with Hov. Kanye West samples Bobby Bland, and he writes himself as injured and wealthy. B.I.G. was right: more money—more problems, so he acts carefully while young rappers spit on him and youngsters ice grill him. Sensitive thugs are identified immediately; all of them need hugs. Wish list remains modest; every car already owned, some nice food, some nice clean drawers, two million sold and aiming for the third one. All the falls get answered in the same manner; bouncing back to the ground like a ball. He held the city down six summers, and still he asks where the love went, so he has to defend his expenses to men who deal with dimes, bigger plates, more baggies and makes the point that the food they have never made him shit.
21. “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)”
He mastered the craft at a kitchen table in Marcy, and everyone who walked through that apartment door gets credit by name on “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me).” He repays those debts in kind on this track, and he maintains the gratitude warm. Mickey feeds him and dresses him, cleans his ears, shampoos his hair. Eric fights him and makes him stronger, the same fly older brother whose clothes he steals for school. Grandma’s share is banana pudding. Hootie changes his diapers, Gil introduces him to the game that changes his life, Jaz gives him belief in rapping, and after the labels pass, Clark seeks him out, and Dame believes. Credits never go stale; a nephew arrives on October 21st and slows the whole life down, and a friend locked in Maryland gets the promises delivered to his mother and to his son. Police chase him, cuff him, subdue him, speak rudely to him because of his youth, wealth and color of his skin. Father gets six words of longing and a prayer for strength to forgive.
22. “Breathe Easy (Lyrical Exercise)”
But it was all in his head before he could go home, he says; memorization in and of itself is part of the exercise. “Breathe Easy (Lyrical Exercise)” is JAŸ-Z training in public on the Just Blaze beat, the conditioning without a scheduled fight. The warm-up is trash talking, the all-time heavyweight champ in the lead in the league in six categories, best flow, most consistent, most real stories, hottest interviews. And then the circuit starts. He jogs in the cemetery, he fights in the same ring; he has a house in the neighborhood where Malcolm X was killed, he runs spring training in December and suicides with the weight of the world on his shoulders, which is why they call him Hova, because he isn’t anywhere near God, just working his goddamn ass off. His second wind kicks in the instant the first one fades. He teaches coke how to stretch like a personal trainer, refers to himself as the ghetto’s Billy Blanks, turns the fifth into a dead lift, squat, or get shot. Robbery turns into spotting; he takes the weight of the watch off the arm of the victim while telling him how to relax.
23. “Public Service Announcement (Interlude)”
A solemn voice introduces the recording to other Americans as history in the making, the product of Just Blaze and company. Two verses with no chorus follow, and in those two JAŸ-Z squeezes in an entire legend in two introductions. His name is spelled out, H to the O-V, and the résumé rolls backwards, snowflakes that were once moved by the O-Z, and he was a CEO even then. Present tense stays imperial, the number one supplier in the music business, fiercer than the paper that bears his name, the hottest chick in the business wears his chain. He counts money like a food inspector, and when his homey tells him to eat his breakfast, he does, rewinds to the dude with the Lex and fast forwards to the jewels and the necklace. Actors get shot at the way movie directors shoot at them. The exit rule appears early and remains posted; love him or leave him alone, and next to it, a self-portrait of Che Guevara with bling on, a complex portrait, both sides of it together.
24. “Threat”
A comedian opens up the audience for a murder ballad, promising to cut a man into pieces and stuff him into a mattress like drug money. Cedric the Entertainer plays the maniac; JAŸ-Z shows up to out-manic the comedic relief, and the jokes never lower the death toll. Nine stacks up going in, nine or ten warnings, nine albums, the nine in his possession, nine lives his enemies possess, 9th Wonder on the beat. He pulls a gun to a man and lets it hum him a song, lets it hum; he brings the second gun out until it is a duet, an unusual musical he directs. He refers to himself as the black Warren Buffett, mentions three years of peeing in a cup and asks what they expect once he is freed up. His rivals become garages full of bullets, strays valeted up to the higher floor, God bless you. Especially Joe Pesci with it. He smiles and promises to kill the man, then himself, and then the man again; and then Cedric swears he will chew the food of his victim and help him swallow it down.
25. “Lucifer”
Bob was killed, and the man who grieves him wants heaven’s forgiveness and the head of his killer in the same prayer. JAŸ-Z does both on “Lucifer” set to the sped-up Max Romeo beat of Kanye West, and he prays, threatens, and mourns all within the same sixteens. “Lord forgive me,” he acknowledges the demons, but he makes the case anyway; they would have killed him, so he kills first, and vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, you said it better than all. The best boys’ killers are left living in respirators. He begs to get his soul right and the devils out before he gets locked up for the rest of it. Grief visits him in dreams, a nine milla held up to the face of the killer of his best boy while he asks him why, eyes watering, mornings when there is no dry pillow, and then the prayer that runs the movie backwards, the crash reversed, the blast reversed, the car moving backwards until Bob is standing there alive. “Bob’s a good dude, Lord,” he pleads to God, “let him in,” and if his heart longs for vengeance, he should blame the son of the morning.
26. “American Dreamin’”
A young man sits down in the La-Z-Boy with smoke hanging in the air, playing the very Marvin Gaye side that the beat is composed from, dreaming in units. JAŸ-Z narrates the story through the hustler he portrays in American Gangster, and the older man interrupts the younger man’s dreams. Harvard gets his hearing and loses; mama forgive me, it is too far away, and people here are starving, nothing wrong with his aim, he just needs to change the target. Sleep provides pillow-sized bags of snow and pies behind his eyes, and life is a bitch he hopes he doesn’t widow. The instructions come across as a syllabus: scramble out of your project and up to the Heights where the big cocaine gets processed, convince the connect that he isn’t from the precinct, speak slow, pay the straight money in a couple of trips to earn consignment, survive the droughts, I wish you well. But he hears himself. Survival? I wish you well? How sick is he? He changes the blessing on the spot, wishing good health, good wheels, good wealth, and the insight to see all that for himself.
27. “No Hook”
And his father comes back into his life and dies almost immediately, the liver already gone, the reunion over in a breath. “No Hook” runs lean from that point, JAŸ-Z over the Barry White sample, no chorus to breathe, identity and capital discussed in a straight line. “The streets took the kid in with open arms,” he says, someplace to crash, and all the counting he will ever need, and after burning everything up, this music is where he buries the ashes. A Jewish lawyer eats fruit from the pile of cash, kept in case the rat-a-tat ever gets used. Own your masters, one word carrying the record business and the plantation with it, and rich, get wealthy, who else gon’ feed we. His mother sighs through the warning; she is afraid her little one will turn into a homicide. “He has to get me out of here or he will die inside,” she says, “either way I lose him, so let loose.” Compare him to trappers, not rappers, more Frank Lucas than Ludacris, and only half of Lucas; the man was cool, and made men are not supposed to make statements.
28. “Fallin’”
He vowed he would end things even before he began: one brick and out. In “Fallin’,” JAŸ-Z watches his deal come apart, and the myth of the invincible hustler gets another crack with each line. At one brick, he looks up to say sorry to God: I lied, give me one more chance and with two bricks, the new rides come in and nobody learning until the news clip. The irony in selling drugs, he figures, is a lot like taking them – there are two sides to substance abuse. Success sets the template for stick-up kids, home invasions, the camera vans, and in the middle of the fall, the hook declares it’s coming back; he knows it comes back, and it will ruin everything he built, and there is no solution. People cheer him falling like a movie scene from The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface and Casino—everybody watching what happened to De Niro after his last run. The month of January turns cold, the letters become slower, the lawyer screaming appeals as he thinks of his bill. If you fight you won’t make it, he advises, but if you run then you won’t make it either, just fall from grace.
29. “Marcy Me”
When ratchet meant the gun and vixen meant the woman, Jam Master Jay was alive and the Marcy kitchen was mid-mix. JAŸ-Z revisits the time period in 4:44 with No I.D., exact and dry-eyed. Pam is on Martin when it all begins, Denzel cleaning carpets while he prepares a nine, Slick Rick mixing “Mona Lisa”, Lisa Bonet being the Beyoncé of the time, and Hamlet enters the nostalgia—we know who we are yet not what we may be, glossed as maybe I’m the one or maybe I’m crazy. Marcy Houses remains where the boys die by the thousands. They name streets as the artery of his existence, the vein of his existence, the heartbeat of Gotham City, lobbies exchanged for parleys with Saudis, and he asks only for a trophy for making it through the bushes smelling like roses, with the coca leaf smell still lingering in the past. Murders become murals, plural. He blesses Nostrand, Flushing, and Myrtle, prays for a fertile ground in the County of Kings, tips the Big Poppa and Daddy Kane, and signs off as his concerto.
30. “What’s Free”
The question is Meek Mill, fresh out of prison, the hook asks in “What’s Free?” The answer is JAŸ-Z, who puts in the ownership papers of his song. In the land of the free, the Blacks were slaves; three-fifths of a man he believes is the phrase, and the equity roll replies, half of D’Ussé debt-free, Ace of Spades full, half of Roc Nation, Tidal equally divided with his people. Don’t give me any red hat, he begs, don’t Michael-and-Prince and Ye-me because they split you with that DNA. Don’t call me one of the house negroes you bought. My place is like a resort and bigger than yours, and the next boast is killed mid-word, spou before he realizes and replaces it with his route is better. No billion streams, a billion dollars; he looks at Billboard like is you dumb and informs his grandmother they will have to kill him first. Then he looks at his own hair, free and carefree, finds nobody close to free and advises them to enjoy their chains.