 popular musicians about their practice is Bob Dylan's Chronicles—is to understand anew the nature of authenticity. As Jay Z writes:
This is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.
Not accidental, then, Jay Z's title. More literary criticism and musicology than memoir, Decoded slyly connects the codes that get rapped in ciphers to how rap, as an art form, demands to be heard with a mind aware of how variously language can be used, and that a word, put next to other words, doesn't necessarily mean what we think, or fear, it does.
TELEVISION AS LITERARY CRITICISM (II)
It's 1989, and Tipper Gore and Ice-T and a range of panelists are on Oprah engaging the question du jour: whether hip-hop MCs are failing to serve as role models for young children who hear their music. They are discussing Gore's initiative to put warning labels on records. She is succeeding in this fight.
In a paperboy cap and a ponytail, with a gold chain terminating in a solid-gold revolver-as-emblem, Ice-T is—as always—holding his own. He's a great debater, able to cycle through rhetorical modes, making the case, a reasonable one, that obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, that the job of the artist isn't to self-censor but to report from the front lines of living. His reality is a harsh one, he concedes, an unwanted one, he admits, but he's in no position to police his experience. He's writing from that experience, and the people he's writing about talk that way, walk that way, sometimes call one another faggots, sometimes call women bitches. He's writing about them, and so it's not his place to censor the ugliness that is a part of that.
Speaking about N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police," he says, "What they're doing is saying, 'Look, I want to be a brother in this life, and I want to do the right thing, but this is what I feel like. I want to hurt a policeman because he's been beating me down.' " And the main point he's making is that, really, most of his songs aren't about the ugliness: They're critiques; they're celebrations; they're parties; and sometimes they're problematic, because the situation is. It's hard, and wrong, to avoid.
NATURALLY, ONE SECTION IN THIS PIECE MUST BE DEVOTED TO BEYONCÉ
How can we talk about Jay Z without talking about Beyoncé? How can we talk about Jay Z without discussing his wife's most recent and best record, Lemonade? How can we avoid asking if Lemonade is a record about their marriage? How can we avoid asking if the suggested narrative of Lemonade is, in fact, the actual story of their actual marriage and actual infidelity? How can we avoid discussing his cameo in the visual-album version of Lemonade, during the song "Sandcastles," in which Beyoncé sits cross-legged on a pillow in a barren apartment at a keyboard as she sings about the fleeting nature of all things, an apartment that appears to be in Paris, an apartment that is barren in the way that Notre-Dame de Paris is barren, an apartment so grand in its scale that it makes heartbreak look like winning the sweepstakes? How can we avoid talking about the moments in that sequence in that apartment where the viewer is given to understand that Beyoncé is thinking about a moment in the past when she and Jay Z were together, in bed, also in Paris, also seemingly in that apartment, Beyoncé reading Le Figaro wearing lovely tortoiseshell reading glasses as Jay Z tries to distract her, before we cut back to Beyoncé singing about fleetingness into the barrenness of that cathedralic apartment, alone, before cutting to another sequence, with Jay Z, where there is no laughter, only sobriety, only