about them, and so it's not his place to censor the ugliness that is a part of that.
Speaking about N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police," he says, "What they're doing is saying, 'Look, I want to be a brother in this life, and I want to do the right thing, but this is what I feel like. I want to hurt a policeman because he's been beating me down.' " And the main point he's making is that, really, most of his songs aren't about the ugliness: They're critiques; they're celebrations; they're parties; and sometimes they're problematic, because the situation is. It's hard, and wrong, to avoid.
NATURALLY, ONE SECTION IN THIS PIECE MUST BE DEVOTED TO BEYONCÉ
How can we talk about Jay Z without talking about Beyoncé? How can we talk about Jay Z without discussing his wife's most recent and best record, Lemonade? How can we avoid asking if Lemonade is a record about their marriage? How can we avoid asking if the suggested narrative of Lemonade is, in fact, the actual story of their actual marriage and actual infidelity? How can we avoid discussing his cameo in the visual-album version of Lemonade, during the song "Sandcastles," in which Beyoncé sits cross-legged on a pillow in a barren apartment at a keyboard as she sings about the fleeting nature of all things, an apartment that appears to be in Paris, an apartment that is barren in the way that Notre-Dame de Paris is barren, an apartment so grand in its scale that it makes heartbreak look like winning the sweepstakes? How can we avoid talking about the moments in that sequence in that apartment where the viewer is given to understand that Beyoncé is thinking about a moment in the past when she and Jay Z were together, in bed, also in Paris, also seemingly in that apartment, Beyoncé reading Le Figaro wearing lovely tortoiseshell reading glasses as Jay Z tries to distract her, before we cut back to Beyoncé singing about fleetingness into the barrenness of that cathedralic apartment, alone, before cutting to another sequence, with Jay Z, where there is no laughter, only sobriety, only stillness, closeness between them but not in bed, Jay Z looking severe, or serious, or contrite, or embattled, or resolute, or unflappable, or any number of other adjectives, before staring out at us as if to say—
You know you made it when the fact
Your marriage made it is worth millions
Lemonade is a popular drink and it still is
Survival of the littest
—something he will say on a verse on a guest appearance a month after Lemonade is released, a verse the Internet will throw, toss, and hurl shade upon, for being a lame-ass response to his wife's amazing record, but which we might not read as a response at all. Rather a comment upon the thing that we can't not talk about when talking about Jay Z: that his marriage to Beyoncé, on April 4, 2008—seven meaningful months before that other meaningful moment in our history that came to pass on November 4, 2008—made theirs the very first of an African-American couple, in our history, that the culture has celebrated the way it celebrates other A-list celebrity marriages: obsessively, invasively, suspiciously, aspirationally, cruelly, lovingly, emptily, fully.
THE "99 PROBLEMS" PROBLEM
Likely the most famous hook on a Jay Z song: "If you're having girl problems, I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one." Routinely, the song is held up as an example of misogyny as entertainment. The song it punctuates is about a drug stop: The narrator has a trunk full of product; a trooper has stopped him on the highway without cause beyond DWB—driving while black. They have an exchange:
"Well, you was doing 55 in a 54
License and registration and step out of the car
Are you carrying a weapon on you? I know a lot of you are"
I ain't stepping out of shit, all my paper's legit
"Well, do you mind if I look around the car a little bit?"
Well, my glove compartment is locked
So is the trunk in the back
And I know my rights, so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack? You some type of lawyer or something?
Somebody important or something?"
Well, I ain