r. It was easy, constant, fluid. He'd pound out beats, rhymes, and write down what came. He could do that. His notebook became a kind of vault. Shawn took to "stuffing it in my mattress like it was cash."
To try to take the full measure of Jay Z—a forty-seven-year-old rapper who has sold tens of millions of albums; a recording artist with twenty-one Grammys; the solo act with the record for the most Billboard number-one albums in the history of recorded music: thirteen; a founder of the clothing retailer Rocawear (with sales in the hundreds of millions); a former president and CEO of Def Jam; a founder of the 40/40 clubs; a founder of Roc Nation, a full-service entertainment company; a founder of Roc Nation Sports, a talent agency for athletes; an owner of Tidal, the artist-owned streaming-music service; the owner of the Budweiser Made in America Festival; a former minority co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets; a producer of film and television; a philanthropist who funds the Shawn Carter Foundation, of which his mother is CEO; a man who, with his wife, Beyoncé Knowles (not incidentally a recording artist with twenty-two Grammys herself, and tens of millions of albums sold), has a combined net worth of close to a billion dollars—is fruitless, hopeless, meaningless. He isn't a man so much as a region, one with its own weather, customs, language.
As he walked through Marcy in 1978 and happened upon Slate, Shawn Corey Carter understood, with his body if not yet with his mind, that the center of the circle was where he was headed. That circle, those circles: In recent years, those informal gatherings of rappers have come to be termed ciphers. The word itself is old. In Arabic, çifr is the arithmetic symbol for zero or naught, a translation of the Sanskrit word for "empty." The word cipher, before it added its most recent meaning, already had three in English, each perfectly apt for that circle of young men in Marcy, what can happen there. Seen from the drone-god, the rapper's cipher was a zero in shape: null, void, an empty space that, as soon as someone enters and begins to rap, fills. The risk of stepping inside, though, is the potential discovery that one is merely a cipher, in that word's second meaning: "a person who fills a place but is of no importance or worth, a nonentity, a mere nothing"—nothing until he opens his mouth and, perhaps, shows he isn't nothing: is multitudes. And from there, in that space, the real fun starts, cipher taking on its last meaning: "the secret, or at least disguised, manner of writing intelligible only to those possessing the key."
"IT'S LIKE THAT"
"Stuffing it in my mattress like it was cash"; "like the church ladies touched by the spirit"; "like he was in a trance"; "like watching some kind of combat"; "like a planet pulled into orbit by a star": To say that Jay Z appreciates the power of simile is pure understatement. Because we live in quantitative times, let's crunch numbers. Put together a concordance to the lyrics of the 193 songs on his solo records to date and you'll see the word he uses most is like—902 times, rarely in the nails-across-blackboard manner of I-was-like-and-then-she-was-like; occasionally to establish a preference; but mostly in the mode of comparison.
Shakespeare, across 154 sonnets, uses like thirty times, and though they're shorter poems and use metaphor more than simile in part because it saves a syllable when you're locked into a ten-syllable line, it's fair to say that simile was less meaningful to Shakespeare than to Jay Z, whose use of it runs from smooth to coarse. Like? "Like a mama you birth me, Brooklyn you nursed me"; "All cherry like a hymen, when I'm rhyming with remarkable timing"; "Life's like a treadmill, niggas runnin' in place"; "Ghetto's Errol Flynn, hot like heroin"; "Businesses like I'm white / But I'm not, I'm just bright"; "my shit is cold like December"; "I pack heat like I'm the oven door"; "Jay shit's like cake mix, watch me rise"; "So I keep one eye open like CBS—you see me stressed, right?"; "I'm like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex / 