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 Untouchables; 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 