From a small-time crack dealer to one of this generation’s most successful musicians, entrepreneur and friend of presidents past and present, rapper Jay-Z, birth name Sean Carter, explains all in his autobiography “Decoded.”
“Each tale contains more of the truth, and the statute allows me to go into detail,” Jay-Z wrote in the song “Real As It Gets” on last years multi-platinum album “The Blue Print 3.”
Behind the pizzazz of editing, the book is more rhetoric and whining than anything else. Each chapter is loosely based around a theme, and an accompanying set of lyrics, which are “decoded” for the reader.
Each lyric sheet contains footnotes in the same vein as a high school Shakespeare reproduction, explaining to the unaware and unhip the meanings of some of Jay-Z’s most popular songs. Chapters featured such themes as “Cautionary Tales” and “Balling and Falling.”
Perhaps more entertaining than any of this is reading a self-proclaimed former crack dealer cite wage statistics of dealers from Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s 2005 book “Freakanomics.”
To oversimplify, most of the slang Jay-Z explains in his book is about crack-cocaine. The rest of it constitutes mostly run-of-the-mill hip-hop allusions to Spike Lee films, Donald Goine’s novels and basketball.
Like many rap songs, the book is full of similes – hip-hop is like a social movement; Jay-Z is like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Ernesto “Che” Guevara. These similes run weaker as the book descends into complaints of scapegoated rappers and the woes of the adored, and he does allude briefly to Kurt Cobain’s suicide note.
However, there are a few good puns along the way, such as “flyer than a paper bearing my name.”
It would be hard to rate “Decoded” without comparing it to two of the other autobiographies that recently stocked the shelves at bookstores – Keith Richards’ “Life” and George W. Bush’s “Decision Points.” Surprisingly, it’s more of the latter than the former.
Bush’s book centers on particular issues within his presidency, ignoring an overt chronology – Jay-Z’s is the same. Unfortunately, the former president did not include a how-to guide to decipher some of his more confusing speeches and policy decisions.
“My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation,” Jay-Z writes.
Because of the poetic nature of his book, we never really learn how one goes from street corner hustler to indulging in the finer things and personal congress with politicians.
In the era of “making it rain” – when a rapper not only claims to be the greatest living, but also the richest — it’s hard not to hold Jay-Z accountable. He has outsold his opponents across the board and enjoyed a success untold to even yesteryear’s hip-hop greats. So is he the greatest?
In another simile, Jay-Z compares rapping to boxing. Much like former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s proclamation of being the “greatest,” it is hard to measure the accomplishments of Jay-Z. A clothing line, a vodka, a record label, critical acclaim – all have been acquired one by one by Jay-Z, yet as even he points out, hip-hop is an urban art form misunderstood by many.
“Great rappers from the earliest days distinguished themselves by looking closely at the world around them and describing it in a clever, artful way,” he argues rap’s benefits to society in great detail throughout the book. Debating and agreeing with Chuck D of Public Enemy’s quote that rap is “black America’s CNN.”
To Jay-Z, rap is multi-faceted – capable of embodying both shameless braggadocio and social conscience; both glamorizing the lifestyle of a crack dealer and bemoaning the blight of a community due to crack consumption.
“Decoded” isn’t an introductory book to hip-hop by any means, nor does it help one “follow in [Jay-Z’s] footsteps,” as the aforementioned song explains. Like many of its peers on the autobiography bookshelf, “Decoded” is only capable of placating fans and providing some backstories to famous moments in the star’s life. Those unfamiliar with the life and times of Sean Carter will most likely be bored and confused.
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