This post ends the Matson on Music preview effort for Jay-Z's KeyArena concert Saturday, Oct. 17th. The effort also included the six-pack series Jay-Z Songs of Note: "Feelin' It," "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)," "Da Graveyard," "Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)," "Fallin'," and "U Don't Know."
When New York City rapper Jay-Z comes to town, maybe he'll hang out with his buddy, "Billy Gates."
Jay-Z plays his first-ever Seattle performance at KeyArena Saturday, Oct. 17.
Last year, when every rapper in the world re-made Lil Wanye's song "A Milli" (a reference to being a millionaire), Jay-Z's version was "A Billi," because he's an almost-billionaire mogul (music, clothes, clubs, vodka, and NBA team...). It included the lyric, "I affili-ate with Billy Gates." Jay-Z also affiliates with Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey.
Even now, at his most bloated and least relevant artistically (recent album "The Blueprint 3" is nearly his worst of 11), and with Charlie Rose and Bill Maher spending hours interviewing him on TV, Jay-Z's major-ness is impossible to overstate.
He's the most successful rapper of all time, absolutely on the short list of the best to ever do it. He's also an adult—he'll be 40 in December—and made adult, album-oriented rap from day one. He has more #1 albums than Elvis. He is the hiphop generation grown up, successful beyond even its own wildest dreams.
You'll fail, but if you want to try, here's how to be like Jay-Z:
Put down the pen
Jay-Z makes rap seem an innate thing, like he's not creating, but letting it out. He calls his process "Rain Man." He listens to a track, mumbles for a while, then gets in front of a microphone and spits out a fully-formed song. And these aren't "My name's Jay-Z and I'm here to say / I love funky beats in a major way" raps. They're complicated.
He says he developed his memory a long time ago while hustling on the streets. No time for writing there.
But the significance of Jay's famous "Rain Man" is not that corner-level drug dealers practice memorizing rhymes, but that he can claim that his talent is inexplicable, maybe even divine.
Pimp your rhymes
On his second album, Jay-Z serves verses to customers in a song called "Rap Game/Crack Game." On his eighth album, he raps about cheapening his product for more returns: "I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars."
"Crossover" is a dirty word in hiphop, but Jay's are crassovers. His most famous rock/rap team-ups—an album with MTV angry-teenager band Linkin Park, a song with Chris Martin from Coldplay—are artistically terrible, less "so crazy it might make sense" and more "so crazy it might make dollars."
His new album "The Blueprint 3" is bland and seems patently crowd-sourced, but is selling well.
He'd have us believe rap is nothing but a hustle, but what's truer is Jay-Z is a hustler.
Say it's only entertainment
Organized crime has been a big lyrical focus throughout Jay-Z's rap career, but to hear him tell it, he left his personal gangster life behind before his first album came out.
Jay's image was more dangerous earlier in his career, reaching a peak in 2001 when he plead guilty to stabbing a man. Now, his image is cuddly. He still raps about crime a lot, but goes out of his way to tell the listener it's just a story.
From "Ignorant S__t" (2007): "believe half of what you see / None of what you hear, even if it's spat by me." Later on the track, he shouts, "It's only entertainment!"
Say it's all real
Jay-Z tells his life story on all his albums, and in pieces with each verse he raps. Born in the projects, sells drugs, gets rich, goes straight, raps to international fame and glory. Never gets caught. Hailed as the best rapper alive.
He's a dream merchant in his raps, a collection of aspirational ads for Gucci clothes, Cristal Champagne (which he later called racist), yachts, and Beyoncé, but his dreams were born in Brooklyn's Marcy projects. In concert, he puts the Marcy Houses on a giant screen behind him. That's where his dad left him and his mom raised him. That's where he learned to sell drugs and rap. That's where Shawn Carter became Jay-Z.
Every year he adds to his personal mythology with all kinds of stories that may be crazy but are studded with true detail: timely name-checks, nicknames, details about this or that business deal, this or that spoiled relationship. Stuff nobody would understand unless they followed his life like a CIA agent. This is how he shows his hard-core fans that even though he may be gone, he's never left the block.
Pass the torch
Kanye West stands tallest among the artists Jay-Z's brought to the rap-listening public, mainly through his own Roc-A-Fella records and a three-year stint as president of Def Jam Recordings. But there's a long list of rappers and producers he's shuttled into the spotlight.
Jay operates in the apprentice system, started out that way, believes in "the come up." He's got a whole song about it called "Coming of Age" (1996), which, in addition to being about the topic, literally illustrates it by featuring his Marcy Houses friend Memphis Bleek as a guest rapper.
Never quit
His first album was supposed to be his last, or at least that's the legend. Then Jay-Z's eighth album, "The Black Album" was supposed to be his last, but he's made two more since.
Jay-Z's addicted to rap.
Recently, he signed a $150 million deal with LiveNation that will have him making music and performing on stage well into middle age.
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