hables; we see him going back and forth with Rick Rubin, hip-hop guru and legendary producer; and we see him rapping in a booth as Rubin records "99 Problems." We hear Rubin exclaim to Mike D of the Beastie Boys, whom Rubin recorded in the eighties and who had dropped by to hang out: "Just to see the way he writes! I've never seen anything like it. He doesn't write anything down. He just kind of sits there, listens to the track, and then goes in and does it."
Rubin, admired for his Buddha-like calm—see the videos of him barefoot in lotus with eyes shut as he listens serenely while some tyrannosauric beat stampedes through his studio—has a look of I-just-saw-Santa amazement at the magic of Jay Z's method. And that magic, which can be shorthanded "Jay Z doesn't write anything down"—because he doesn't have to: he has a photographic memory—degrades down the line to "Jay Z doesn't write anything," which would be an embarrassing thing indeed, in the way that it's embarrassing, as the curtain rises at the conclusion of Singin' in the Rain, to learn that Debbie Reynolds is doing the singing for Jean Hagen, or that on "Still D.R.E."—oh, the irony—Dr. Dre is rapping verses written for him by Jay Z.
I said that the word that Jay Z uses most in his complete lyrics is like. This is true and not true. It is the single word that he uses most. However, if we combine singular and plural uses of words, the word he uses most is: nigga. He has used it 1,149 times to date.
TELEVISION AS LITERARY CRITICISM (I)
James Lipton, of Inside the Actors Studio, interviewed Chris Rock. Lipton, of the beard and the self-mocking self-seriousness, asked Rock about the word he (Lipton) hates most in the English language.
"Hands down," he says, that word "is the n-word."
There is a robust pause. Rock double-takes to the friendly crowd.
"Now I got this job?" Rock says. " 'Explain nigger. Go ahead!' I'm the wrong guy to explain nigger." And yet explain he does.
"It's the same philosophy," he says, "as soul food: They gave us the scraps and we made it into cuisine. We took this word and we made it into poetry. It's horrible, but put some sauce on it and it's poetry. Nigger is the nitroglycerin of words. In the wrong hands, it can hurt. But if you give it to the right scientist, a Dave Chappelle, an Ice Cube, an Eddie Murphy. What they did—what N.W.A and Richard Pryor did with the word—is art. It's Mark Twain."
"GETTING DOWN TO WHAT'S REALLY REAL"
Authenticity in rap is its own conversation. It gets tricky, fast. The appeal of the cipher as a space is clear: Here someone can see himself transformed from nothing into something in the eyes of the world and, in so doing, redefine the way they see themselves. Given that the cipher as a space originates in places—Compton, Bed-Stuy, Chicago's South Side—where that imaginative space is one of the few dependable refuges from an inescapable reality, the idea that someone in the cipher would be speaking from the heart of the self takes on a different charge. Authenticity would be all one has—the most valuable currency, the purest paper, the artistic $1,000 bill. To counterfeit that purity would be the purest form of corruption.
And yet if we consider that of the more than one thousand unique songs Frank Sinatra recorded, he was a credited writer on only seven, and that some of Johnny Cash's most memorable performances are of other people's songs, we understand that, in some domains, authenticity comes from a different place. Only a fool would accuse Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday of being phonies because the words they sang about love and loss weren't autobiographical documents of their lived experience. In hip-hop, though, the stakes are different, because the art is different, is an art of authenticity: Speakers in hip-hop are, most often, voices that hadn't been heard from in American life. The great novel or film or ballet or opera by the talented young artist who was supporting his ongoing work by dealing crack had yet to appear.
To read Decoded—a book whose closest companion on the narrow shelf of great books by