Thomas and hop on a yacht just to film a video. From the outset, Jay Z projected surface glamor: He was the first rapper to book a flight out to St. The narrative that emerges from a close reading of Reasonable Doubt remains startlingly grim seen up close, it is a masterpiece of dissociation, a graveyard of dead emotions. What Biggie and Pac did for self-mythologizing and hip-hop, Jay undoubtedly did for the art of close reading. He wanted us to feel the discomfited hum of his unquiet mind, even if we couldn’t immediately follow every stray thread. He was thinking on several levels at once-how phonetics color meaning, how multiple meanings can suggest all the stories that aren’t being told. On “Can I Live,” he matches the “Fs” and “Ls” in the phrase “illin’ for revenues, Rayful Edmond-like” to create an irregular little mountain-peak rhythm that echoes the stuttering “expectation for dips, we stack chips” line from earlier in the same verse. Lines like “By the ounce, dough accumulate like snow” were their own kind of song, and he treated each syllable with a reverent love undetectable elsewhere in his work. These were the lyrics he’s been painstakingly stacking together in his head for years (the “no pen, no pad” detail is another famous and well-rehearsed bit of Jay mythos), and he rolled them out, one pearly string of words after another, like he was exhaling a breath he’d been holding forever. Even though his voice never rose above a conversational monotone, his words sailed high and glittering over the music, which sampled butter-soft soul from previous decades, blurred memories of more innocent times. The syllable chopping disappeared and his words became musical and mellifluous.
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He also figured out how to best wield his clear, surprisingly boyish voice.
“You ain’t havin’ it? Good, me either/Let’s get together and make this whole world believe us,” he barked. It is hard to convincingly telegraph “above it all” from the bottom of the food chain, but Shawn Carter had a natural haughtiness that couldn’t be faked.
His years selling drugs had presumably hardened him, and by the time he opened his mouth on Reasonable Doubt’s opening track, “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” he had mastered an unshakable godfather pose. Gone were the endearing attempts at dancing alongside Jaz, looking like a kid at his own bar mitzvah being coaxed onto the floor. Composed, assured, jaded, deeply unimpressed-these were emotions he could radiate without even trying, and they were truer to his nature. First, nobody wanted to hear Jay Z excited. In that murky time between his puppyish Jaz-O beginnings and his sober and assured reappearance on Reasonable Doubt, he figured some things out. He was an impressive local kid, but no one’s idea of a worldwide star. He toured, briefly, with Big Daddy Kane, and spit some freestyles for New York hip-hop radio. He linked up with Big Jaz (later Jaz-O), doing a stint as the older man's baby-faced sidekick and kicking the triplet-time “figgity-figgity”-style flows that were sweeping New York at the time. At this point, by his own cold-eyed accounting on the song “Politics As Usual,” he had been selling drugs for “10 years.” Along a parallel track, he had been flirting furtively with being a rapper. In Jay’s mind at least, the album certainly marked the end of an era. He announced the album with a statement that he was retiring and henceforth “would only be about the business.” In some alternate universe, that might’ve been it. The smaller but more influential world of hardcore rap intelligentsia paid attention to him, but in the shadow of Biggie and Pac, Jay felt like a lesser myth. The Source gave it 4 out of 5 mics-approving, not rapturous. Critics were impressed, but not overly so: Mainstream and non-hip-hop publications noted it was clever at times but mostly a rehash of Scarface and gangster-movie tropes.
“Ain’t No Nigga” was a hit, for sure, and the album was certified Gold on its release solid, but hardly world-conquering in the dynastic era CD sales. Perhaps he’s never forgotten its relatively inauspicious release. He has curated its legacy so assiduously that Reasonable Doubt seems like the one part of his story about which he remains insecure, the piece of his legacy that might blink out if he didn’t take care of it.
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He’s thrown it a series of lavish birthday parties, celebrating its 10th anniversary with a full-concert performance in 2006 and commissioning a documentary to air only on his TIDAL streaming service for its 20th. He keeps yanking it from streaming services, as if the album is a troubled prep-school kid. Shawn Carter has always been fiercely protective of his first full-length, to the degree that it sometimes feels like it belongs more to him than to us.