 space that, as soon as someone enters and begins to rap, fills. The risk of stepping inside, though, is the potential discovery that one is merely a cipher, in that word's second meaning: "a person who fills a place but is of no importance or worth, a nonentity, a mere nothing"—nothing until he opens his mouth and, perhaps, shows he isn't nothing: is multitudes. And from there, in that space, the real fun starts, cipher taking on its last meaning: "the secret, or at least disguised, manner of writing intelligible only to those possessing the key."
"IT'S LIKE THAT"
"Stuffing it in my mattress like it was cash"; "like the church ladies touched by the spirit"; "like he was in a trance"; "like watching some kind of combat"; "like a planet pulled into orbit by a star": To say that Jay Z appreciates the power of simile is pure understatement. Because we live in quantitative times, let's crunch numbers. Put together a concordance to the lyrics of the 193 songs on his solo records to date and you'll see the word he uses most is like—902 times, rarely in the nails-across-blackboard manner of I-was-like-and-then-she-was-like; occasionally to establish a preference; but mostly in the mode of comparison.
Shakespeare, across 154 sonnets, uses like thirty times, and though they're shorter poems and use metaphor more than simile in part because it saves a syllable when you're locked into a ten-syllable line, it's fair to say that simile was less meaningful to Shakespeare than to Jay Z, whose use of it runs from smooth to coarse. Like? "Like a mama you birth me, Brooklyn you nursed me"; "All cherry like a hymen, when I'm rhyming with remarkable timing"; "Life's like a treadmill, niggas runnin' in place"; "Ghetto's Errol Flynn, hot like heroin"; "Businesses like I'm white / But I'm not, I'm just bright"; "my shit is cold like December"; "I pack heat like I'm the oven door"; "Jay shit's like cake mix, watch me rise"; "So I keep one eye open like CBS—you see me stressed, right?"; "I'm like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex / I never claimed to have wings on"; "I got the soul of a hustler, quiet noise like a muffler / Fuck with us, walk through the ghetto, see the place that corrupted us."
If a cipher, like all literature, is a code, one that unlocks the complexities of other people, each individual's distinct way of expressing the world, a simile is the purest tool of poetic transformation. It says to its hearer: I am having a feeling; the feeling is difficult to describe; I can't possibly share this feeling or this thought—so urgent in its sorrow; so desperate in its joy—with you directly. What I can do is: try to tell you what it's like.
The story of Jay Z's first cipher comes from his book, Decoded (2010). If you haven't gotten to it, don't deny yourself the pleasure, especially if you supposed that it was just another celebrity's quote-unquote book, part of what Jerry Seinfeld calls "the kit" that comes your way when you get big (contents: a TV show, a movie deal, a show in Vegas, a book deal, and, presumably, someone to write your book for you). Though Jay Z credits the writer Dream Hampton for being "a GODSEND" in the making of the book, evidence suggests Hampton was the equivalent of a recording angel in the process, essential in the way of someone like Kanye or Just Blaze or Eminem—whom no one would accuse of having written Jay Z's verses . . . except for the people who accuse Jay Z of not writing his verses, who are, actually, legion.
Troll message boards across the pure and righteous interweb and you'll encounter the "Jay Z doesn't write his own verses" trope, along with "fraud" and "wannabe" and "sellout" tags. I don't know a thing about the true truth—I haven't been a witness to the making of his work—but this vitriol seems a straightforwardly pure and instructive instance of the soul-murdering game of Telephone. In Fade to Black, the worth-your-valuable-time documentary about the making of Jay Z's eighth record, The Black Album, and the brief sabbatical it initiated, we see Jay Z getting shaved like De Niro in The Untouc