Jay Z convinced me that hip-hop was the musical genre most intrinsic to the human experience. Although I had yet to graduate high school or declare a major when I began listening in my sophomore year of high school, Jay made me understand that being able to write is a skill like no other.
Let’s get a few of my opinions straight before I explain: One — Jay Z is my favorite artist, two — “The Black Album” is my favorite album of all time and three — Jay Z is the greatest hip-hop artist of all time. I’ll tell you why.
Courtesy of Roc-A-Fella Records.
I started writing about hip-hop my sophomore year of high school. I had fallen in love with the genre years prior, and I was beginning to see the effects pay off. In my sophomore year, I began getting better grades in my English classes. This improvement could have been due to a sudden embrace of classic British literature, but it wasn’t.
I realized that as I read Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass, I translated what I understood from Kanye West (Ye) and Jay Z. I had begun to connect with significant historical writers due to my understanding of hip-hop albums, yet I was frustrated with the lack of recognition hip-hop received in academic settings. Why was the genre not treated as high art? Kendrick Lamar had recently won a Pulitzer Prize for “DAMN.,” a concept album on which one could map the narrative to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Unlike the Bible story, however, the tracklist on Lamar’s album can be played in reverse to reveal a completely different narrative. These artists were creating transformational art, but the world was only just beginning to notice.
As I dove deeper into my music journey, I found myself exploring different sides to hip-hop’s brilliance. One criticism I always found unconvincing was the idea that, unlike a movie or book, hip-hop’s stories were not always linear nor consistent throughout an album. My response is that hip-hop is more similar to a TV series than a film. A narrative album such as “DAMN.” could span a complete story from start to finish, like “Breaking Bad” as a series. An album could also be made up of completely different stories, each song a different episode like “Seinfeld,” as in Nipsey Hussle’s “Victory Lap.” However, I’ve always particularly enjoyed a third format, that of “The Black Album.” Like “The Office,” this form ties different stories together from song to song but thematically advances throughout the length of the record. Difficult to pull off but spectacular when done well, Jay has cemented himself as an expert in this third form.
Jay’s work has continuously pushed me toward seeing the world as a complex entity. This maturity is a facet that defines “The Black Album” and sets it apart from some of his earlier work. On “Reasonable Doubt,” Jay’s debut, he seems to still have one foot on the street and one on the studio. However, having grown as an artist and human being, “Black Album” touches on everything from family to self-image. On the introductory “December 4th,” he raps, “I pray I’m forgiven/ For every bad decision I made/ And it’s nobody fault, I made the decisions I made/ This is the life I chose, or rather, the life that chose me.” However difficult his path to success, Jay taught me that respect is earned through hard work and failure. Brilliant and indescribably influential, I realized that if a kid from Brooklyn could change the world with a pen and a boombox, maybe I could too.
Ben Brodsky (he/him) (25B) is from Scottsdale, Arizona. He has explored hip-hop history since 2019, first on his blog SHEESH hip hop, and now with “Hip Hop Heroes,” a series of essays on narrative in hip-hop. When not writing about Jay-Z, you can find him writing “Brodsky in Between,” an Opinion column on political nuance, graphic designing and playing basketball.
