"With the same sword they knight you / They go and goodnight you / See Martin, see Malcolm / See Biggie, see Pac, see success and its outcome / See Jesus, see Judas / See Caesar, see Brutus / See, success is like suicide...Now the question is / Is to have had and lost / Better than not having at all? Because dawg: 'I'm just waiting 'til the shine wears off...'"
This passage - from Jay-Z's guest spot on Coldplay's 'Lost+' remix track - is what's known among New Yorker types as an 'echt Jay-Z flourish,' which I do not mean as a compliment. The idea that Jay-Z is hip-hop's best MC has been common currency for the better part of a decade, but it's never been believable. Hell, let's go along with the stupid charade and restrict our c consideration to commercial acts: in a world containing Gift of Gab, Eminem, Mos Def, Outkast (both halves), Latyrx (as a unit), Nas, Lauryn Hill, Black Thought, and Boots Riley - never mind cats like Aceyalone or Q-Tip or Kool Keith(!!) or even the infuriating trickster Kanye West - Jay-Z has to come bowing and scraping just to get into the top half-dozen. He's got skill and arguably taste, sure, but his sole subject of interest is his own adolescent messianic complex. And that disqualifies Mr Sean Carter from top MC honours.
If Dave Eggers had followed his moving, messy, ferociously sentimental A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with a half-dozen books in which complained at ever-increasing length that no one understood how difficult his life was even though he was the baddest and the richest - and indeed wrote a second and a third memoir insisting that he was finished writing and everyone was really, really gonna miss him when he stopped - but then was back on Entertainment Tonight a year later - Eggers would be a fucking laughingstock, and rightly so. Jay-Z is inexplicably still taken seriously by 'critics' despite having pulled this juvenile shit time and again. Now, Eggers has Jay-Z's technical skill, his energy, his hunger to collaborate, and his (admirable!) willingness to mentor. But unlike our Yet Another Self-Proclaimed 'Best Rapper Alive,' Eggers keeps challenging himself with increasingly esoteric (and increasingly powerful) projects in an ever-widening circle of colleagues and collaborators.
In other words, Dave Eggers managed to grow up. He got past himself, which was no small task. Mr Beyoncé has been churning out the same tired cliché psychobabble for half a decade, piling indigestible sentimental treacle atop misogynist bile atop vacuous self-justification and self-admiration. He's under the impression that he's intrinsically interesting; he's wrong.
'If you can't accept that / Your whole perspective is wack / Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black.' But he's never faded, never seriously entertained the possibility of doing so. He's a prolonged-adolescent narcissist with more money than ambition. That he's avoided Kanye's pathetic drunken self-parody is creditable, but Jay-Z's too childishly self-serious to pull off Kanye's frat-boy pranks (never mind the far more subversive boundary-crossing of Andre 3000).
The worst thing about this? Jay-Z's smart as hell. He could be doing something other than preening and boasting and whining and spouting the same dull money-sucks cautionary tales in song after song. If he wanted to, he could put aside his own self-love and self-loathing and status fixation and get on with making music about the world beyond the window of his SUV. But he's not even trying. His big mould-breaking album of this decade was American Gangster, for Christ's sake.
Jay-Z needs to get on the phone to Billy Martin or DJ Spooky or TV on the Radio or ?uestlove or John Zorn or Andrew Bird or the Pet Shop Boys or Elvis Costello or Fiona Apple or the Flaming Lips or even Trey Anastasio (remember that Jay-Z sat in with Phish in Brooklyn in 2004) and explode himself for once. Find a new idea, which these folks have in spades.[**] Jay needs to put his verbal talent and metrical dexterity to work on the story of another human being. He needs any new story to tell. Why? Because we need storytellers and musicians with ambition, persistence, skill, and honesty, and if Mr Sean Carter wasn't moonlighting as a fashionista businessman he'd be a fine source of all those things and more. Why not? Stranger, finer things have happened.
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[**] I'm dead serious about all of the above, except possibly the inscrutable genius Andrew Bird. But they are, as you can see, mostly white rock'n'roll dudes. My hipster parochialism shouldn't surprise you, but it does bother me. Not enough to do anything about it, mind you, just enough that I have to footnote the thing. I do think a Jay-Z/John Zorn collaboration would be awesome - the JZ initials match is a good omen, no? - and when they want to, Medeski Martin & Wood have the 'best hip-hop producers on earth' trophy waiting for them. But these pairings hold cultural significance for me because I'm a stodgy little white nerd. They're not particularly transgressive, I know. To be clear, I don't want Jay-Z to stop cutting tracks about dimwitted consumerist hedonism and start documenting life in the suburbs of Houston. I just want to know whether he can even do it. Easier prescribed than pursued, as the narrowness of my suggestions makes clear.
