ved with their trunks of wares, Timbaland has come to offer Jay Z beats. This is a central role in the hip-hop process. Here, Timbaland, drinking what remains of a pink beverage from a gallon jug he hoists like it is not a gallon jug, sits at a keyboard and plays Jay Z a succession of beats, instrumental tracks with different feels, skeletons for possible songs, should they ignite the creativity of their auditor. Jay Z listens intently, in the manner of someone tasting a '59 Chateau Margaux. He evaluates, his expression becoming that of a man spitting in a bucket. One of the beats you recognize: It will become "The Potion," by Ludacris. Another, too, is familiar: It will become "Come As You Are," by Brandy. Jay Z is being offered them first, and is unmoved.
But then Timbaland plays one more. It lasts for all of a second, an explosion of allurement. Timbaland presses pause. You recognize that explosion; it's that recognizable. He laughs; he is a good salesman; he has saved the best for last. Hook sunk, he yanks, hits play. Jay Z does not stare: Rather, he is a lighthouse, rounding on Timbaland with his blinding beam. He is not moving to the beat: Rather, he is a spring, sprung. Timbaland is moving, too, dancing, hands up, hands down, and then up, to his shoulders, then down, with a little motion on his upper chest, right below his shoulders, a—what would you call it?—a little brushing motion.
And across Jay Z's face there's a moment of recognition.
The beat becomes the basis for a song issued as a B-side to "99 Problems," a song called "Dirt off Your Shoulder." You know the video: Jay Z and a succession of women and men mime the brushing off of their shoulders. You know the hook:
If you feeling like a pimp
Nigga, go and brush your shoulders off
Ladies is pimps too, go and brush your shoulders off
Niggas is crazy, baby, don't forget that boy told you
Get that dirt off your shoulder
You gotta get that dirt off your shoulder
How are we to interpret this gnomic injunction? How are we to understand the proper use of the idiom in question? Its purest reading came thirteen days after the Carter-Knowles nuptials: April 17, 2008.
"When you're running for the presidency," candidate Barack Obama said, on the trail, to a huge crowd, on that day, "then you've got to expect it." The "it" was being attacked by one's rival, then Hillary Clinton, who'd been coming at Obama hard that season. And how did the candidate say one should handle it?
"You just gotta, kinda, let it"—and here, you recall, with his right hand, he mimed the brushing off of his right shoulder—"you know"—and then he mimed the same off of his left. "You know," he said.
Verily the crowd did know. The crowd went, as we say, wild.
"It's what you gotta do," Obama said.
Crowd going wilder.
"That's what you gotta do."
THE USES OF JAY Z
"It is natural to believe in great men," or so Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us at the start of Representative Men, his study of varieties of extraordinary human beings. Emerson offers chapters on Plato ("The Philosopher"), Swedenborg ("The Mystic"), Montaigne ("The Skeptic"), Shakespeare ("The Poet"), Napoleon ("The Man of the World"), and Goethe ("The Writer"), each a kind of autopsy of the particular bounty of being that each of these people willed to the human family. "The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome," Emerson tells us. "Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society." If not for advancing the most perfect roster of human excellence—no representative women; none but white men—Emerson's essays endure for their capacity to establish what we mean when we call individuals "great." Yes, he makes clear, it's what such people do, of course; but really, it's what their doing licenses others to imagine. "Men exist," Emerson writes, "that there may be greater men."
LITERATURE AS TELEVISION CRITICISM
Jay Z, in Decoded:
I've met a lot of powerful people, but Oprah, as everyone knows, is in her own stratosphere. She's also someone who has been vocally skeptical about hip-hop for a long time becau