 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't passed the bar, but I know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my shit
"Well, we'll see how smart you are when the K9 come"
I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one; hit me!
That hook is what in rap gets called interpolation and in your high school poetry class would be called allusion: Jay Z did not write it. Rather, Ice-T did, a decade earlier, for his song of the same name. That song, however, is not about a racist cop wrongly stopping a black man who wasn't speeding ("55 in a 54") but is, actually, a drug dealer. No, it's about the bitches Ice-T fucks—an over-the-top party song, the song you could imagine our sitting president humming to himself as he grabs bitches by the pussy—"locker-room talk."
Setting aside the ugly ironies here (intended) as being not central to our discussion, Jay Z's song is not about women. Rather, the bitch in his chorus is a drug-sniffing hound (the "K9") who, it turns out, will not be a problem for the narrator, because the trooper lets the dealer roll off. Jay Z's appropriation of the Ice-T hook, then, is meant to entertain the rap aficionado with its nod to an elder; to delight the active listener with a playful use of a word that rappers regularly get called out for using and that, here, he's using differently; and to make those who'll single out this song as misogynistic reexamine their reflex to hold rap responsible for lowering the level of rhetoric by themselves having to consider the rhetorical sophistication of rap artists.
As Jay Z writes in Decoded, " '99 Problems' is a good song to use to talk about the difference between the art of rap and the artlessness of some of its critics. It's a song that takes real events and reimagines them. It's a narrative with a purposefully ambiguous ending. And the hook itself . . . is a joke, bait for lazy critics."
THE BRUSH HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD: A GENEALOGY
In the behind-the-scenes video, we see superproducer Timbaland, a very large, very jolly fellow, in the studio with Jay Z. Like traveling salesmen of yore, arri