Decoded (46 page)

9.
Hip-hop and hustling both represent ways of making money that pale in comparison to the crooked history of American power and wealth. What rappers and hustlers have made is a fraction of the real wealth generated by so-called legitimate businesses that have been a thousand times more harmful to society. Behind every great fortune, they say, is a great crime. Our fortunes—and our crimes—are not even in the same league as the real wealth in this country.

BEWARE (JAY-Z REMIX)

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1.
Not my cleverest image, but it gets the point across and connects back to the Indian roots of the song (snake charmers are an Indian phenomenon). This opening was done in the spirit of a party song—fun, with a simple and catchy rhyme structure (one/young/two/you) and lyrics that evoke a crowded club.

2.
I recorded this eight years after
Reasonable Doubt.
I was also planning on calling my next album
8th Wonder
at the time—it ended up being
The Black Album.
And of course, Wonder is also bread.

3.
A couple of subtle Snoop references in these lines, from “6 in the A.M.” and “P.I.M.P.”

4.
The “track” connects back to the P-I-M-P line—pimps run their hoes on “tracks,” urban strips where clients come to find prostitutes.

5.
SMPTE is a timecode attached to recordings so that they can be edited.

6.
A play off of Biggie’s line from “Going Back to Cali”:
it’s the N-O, T-O, R-I, O /-U-S, / you just lay down slow.

7.
I was against the war, but wanted to be clear that I felt for the soldiers out there fighting it. I know people who joined the military, sometimes just because they didn’t have a better option, sometimes because they genuinely thought they were doing something for the good of the country. But soldiers in an army are like soldiers in the hood, to some degree—they’re really all fighting someone else’s war; they’re cannon fodder for men richer and more powerful than them. So I’m not going to attack the soldiers as a group, even if I think their leaders are idiots.

8.
This is a weird line coming from me, given that I don’t usually rhyme about love being the answer. But I do sometimes get clear about the pointlessness of aggression, and this was one of those days. You have to be a special person—a Gandhi—to really live by that sort of ethic, and I know that if I’m provoked, I’m almost always going to strike back. But deep down, I know it’s true that love is what kills hate.

9.
Ronald Reagan got Manhattan to “blow”—slang for cocaine—through the whole Iran-Contra scandal, which got the United States involved in the drug trade that brought crack to the hood so they could finance the Contras in Central America. In the worst years of the crack epidemic—the late eighties and early nineties—there were literally thousands of homicides annually in New York. So juxtaposing Reagan and bin Laden isn’t as crazy as it may seem. This is a piece of our recent history that people like to forget or pretend never happened so they can maintain some fantasy of American purity—which is why I thought it was important to include it in this rhyme. It’s that same sort of historical amnesia and myth of America’s innocence that led us into the war in Iraq. In my little way, I’m trying to kill that myth by reminding people of the truth—because that myth is a dangerous thing for the whole world.

10.
“Mami” here flows from its opposite, “Papi,” a few lines before, and connects the end of the song to the opening when I say “I came to see the mamis in the spot.”

BLUE MAGIC / FEATURING PHARRELL

Back to Lyrics

1.
The collision of two figures of speech—“flip,” meaning first to speak, and then to sell something for more than you bought it, and “birds,” meaning a kilo of coke—creates a third strangely poetic image of birds doing flips in the sky like some kind of hallucinogenic circus act.

2.
360 waves form a circular pattern, like stirring a pot, which is how you turn cocaine into off-white crack rocks (which is why it “comes back hard”).

3.
In this line I pronounce wrists “wristses” to rhyme it with bitches. Twisting pronunciation to create rhymes works when the distortion feels witty, not desperate.

4.
Commissary, the prison’s own system for doling out extras, is unnecessary for our crew because we have connections—“creole C.O. bitches” (C.O. = corrections officer)—who will bring them whatever “treats” they need.

5.
This was the first single off of my
American Gangster
album, which was inspired by the movie about Frank Lucas and the rise of the drug game in the seventies and eighties in New York.

6.
These next lines connect back to the lines about the eighties, which is when hip-hop culture first exploded, with b-boys breaking (spinning on their heads) and writers covering the cities in graffiti. But the eighties were also when hustling exploded, too, and I literally “hustled in the halls” of buildings, even though I never made history—for better or worse—like Frank Lucas.

7.
P’s singing the hook he borrowed from En Vogue’s “Hold On” (
don’t waste your time / fighting blind / minded thoughts / of despair
), another eighties reference (okay, it was 1990, but very close).

8.
1987 was the year Eric B and Rakim released
Paid in Full,
a contender for the most influential hip-hop record of all time. This links up to the subtle Rakim reference at the end of the previous verse—
I don’t write on the wall / write my name in the history books / hustling in the hall
—which plays off of Rakim’s line from “My Melody” (off
Paid in Full
):
whether playin ball / bobbing in the hall / or just writin my name / in graffiti on the wall.

9.
This song is full of homonyms and synonyms—
fishscale, contra, concert.
I love the following quote because I made a conscious effort to use homonyms in this way, and someone actually noticed: “It testifies to Jay-Z’s lyrical ingenuity that even though we fully experience these poetic lines by ear rather than by eye, looking at them on the page calls attention to their individual effects, not just their cumulative impact. Equally as impressive as the homonym is that he delivers it while making a fairly complicated point, all while rhyming four lines together.” —Adam Bradley,
The Book of Rhymes

10.
Just like in the previous verse, the last line of one verse connects to the first line of this one—the previous verse’s last line was about how Reagan and Ollie North were hypocritically working hand-in-hand with hustlers to move drugs, the first line in this verse ends with “fuck Bush,” Reagan’s crooked-ass Republican heir. There’s also another homonym here—Bush as in George and bush as in pussy.

11.
Hook/hook is another homonym—
hook
in the sense of getting caught, and
hook
in the sense of a chorus in a song. I wasn’t down with either.

12.
I like the internal rhymes here. You’re waiting for me to finish the rhyme for Siamese, but I throw in
twin/end
and
stand/man
before I get there with
knees.
This is an unusual track—a minimalist beat with drum rolls and synthesizer chords—and I came up with a flow that could weave through it, which meant sometimes the lines breathed and other times the rhymes were more tightly wrapped.

THIS LIFE FOREVER

Back to Lyrics

1,
I recorded this for the soundtrack of a film that never got made called
Black Gangster,
based on the Donald Goines novel.

2.
This song is based on a real moment in my life. It was probably 1994 or 1995, the years before I released
Reasonable Doubt,
before I’d fully made a transition from one life to the next. I was riding in my white Lexus 300, a car that always caught people’s eyes when I’d park it outside of shows back then. Everyone at the club might have thought of me as an up-and-coming rapper who didn’t even have a deal yet, but the 300 made them think twice about who I really was.

3.
That day, I was in the car with my nephews, who were teenagers then. I was listening to Donny Hathaway and moving slow, like ten miles an hour, just rolling around Fort Greene, Brooklyn. I was totally sober, but I felt my consciousness shifting. I looked around and suddenly everything was clear: girls younger than my nephews pushing babies in strollers, boys working the corners, old women wheeling wobbly shopping carts over cracked sidewalks. It was like a movie unfurling on my windshield with Donny Hathaway on the soundtrack. But it wasn’t a movie, it was my world. It fucked me up.

4.
“Spark” has a double meaning: It can refer to lighting up a gun or lighting up a blunt. Either way, it’s an attempt to escape the harsh life.