From the projects hustlin’ crack to the top of hip-hop to board room executive, Jay-Z has been around. For me, as a white boy who was raised in what felt like the heartbeat of the suburbs, I didn’t exactly grow up feeling like hip-hop was the voice of my experience in the world; but neither is Baroque polyphony and I can get down on Johann’s fugues all day long. Overtime I have nurtured a strong respect for the hip-hop phenomenon and the artists who define it.

In this fresh looking book Jay-Z tells his story and outlines a host of his songs with footnotes for clarification. One might say he: decodes them…But in all seriousness, so far, what I have read of the book it is very fascinating. Jay-Z has had the insight to be able communicate his experience with a person like me and know that there is power in that.

“Hip-hop had described poverty in the ghetto and painted pictures of  violence and thug life, but I was interested in something a little different: the interior space of a young kid’s head, his psychology. Thirteen-year-old kids don’t wake up one day and say, ‘Okay, I just wanna sell drugs on my mother’s stoop, hustle on my block till I’m so hot niggas want to come look for me and start shooting out my mom’s living room windows.’ Trust me, no one wakes up in the morning and wants to do that. To tell the story of  the kid with the gun without telling the story of why he has it is to tell a kind of lie.”

-John P.

Share