Earlier this year, VH1, the music-video channel, broadcast a television series called “Bands on the Run.” Four rock groups were sent on tour, competing to see which one could sell the most merchandise; the winner would get a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of new equipment, fifty thousand dollars in cash, a VH1-financed video, and a showcase concert with industry executives. The bands weren’t very good, but the animosity of the competition was entertaining. In one episode, a group called Soulcracker started a grassroots smear campaign, telling fans that a victory for the rival group Flickerstick would be a victory for “corporate rock.” It was an absurd claim—both bands were, after all, angling for a corporate contract, on a corporate television show—and the insult backfired: Flickerstick demanded an apology, and got one. The next week, Flickerstick won the competition.
What’s funny about the insult is how old-fashioned it seems. The term “corporate rock” is a relic of the nineteen-seventies, popularized by critics who felt that the big record companies had coöpted a rebellious, authentic genre for mass consumption. In 1978, the rock journalist Lester Bangs wrote, “The music business today still must be recognized as by definition an enemy, if not the most crucial enemy, of music and the people who try to perform it honestly.” Over the past ten years, though, “corporate rock” has been upstaged by “corporate rap,” which has emerged as the country’s new music. Rappers are responsible for three of the country’s ten most popular albums, and the Recording Industry Association of America estimates that last year rap music generated more than $1.8 billion in sales, accounting for 12.9 per cent of all music purchases; it has surpassed country music as the nation’s second most popular genre, after rock and roll. The obscure rap record labels Fo’ Reel and Hypnotize Minds have teamed up with the media conglomerates Vivendi Universal and Sony, respectively, and have found millions of customers. Rappers, with a few notable exceptions, are black men, but their listeners are not: about seventy per cent of the people who buy rap albums are white, and an increasingly large percentage are female. “Hip-hop,” once a noun, has become an adjective, constantly invoked, if rarely defined; people talk about hip-hop fashion and hip-hop novels, hip-hop movies and hip-hop basketball. Like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties, hip-hop is both a movement and a marketing ploy, and the word is used to describe almost anything that’s supposed to appeal to young people.
What’s most unexpected about this boom is the reaction of the rappers themselves, who rose to prominence as icons of rebellion and authenticity. They have not only accepted corporate rap but embraced it. Like Frank Sinatra before them, they are chairmen of the board: Fortune put the rapper Master P on its cover in 1999, after he branched out into film production, sports management, and fashion, and today’s biggest rap acts, from OutKast to Snoop Dogg, are diversifying, leveraging their popularity to create their own companies. Eminem may deliver antisocial lyrics, but as a businessman he’s a model citizen, an entrepreneur who recently put his solo career on hold so he could build up his new imprint, Shady Records.
The greatest of the corporate rappers is Jay-Z, a thirty-one-year-old tycoon from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He has all the necessary credentials: a record label (Roc-A-Fella Records), a clothing company (Rocawear), a production house (Roc-A-Fella Films). What’s more, he has the right sensibility: nonchalant, devious, witty. He has put out five successful albums in five years—the only rapper to have done so—starting with “Reasonable Doubt,” his début, in 1996, and he’s sold more than eleven million records. Many rappers have made money, and lots of it, but none have rapped so eloquently about making money, or about the lure of wealth and ambition. Jay-Z has succeeded by treating hip-hop above all as a corporate enterprise, by embracing ruthless professionalism as his guiding aesthetic. As he once put it, “What y’all about to witness is big business, kid.”
I met Jay-Z for the first time this spring, in Los Angeles. He was in town for the Soul Train Music Awards (he’d been named male entertainer of the year), and I spent a day watching him rehearse and shop for sneakers at a nearby mall. There was a constant procession of well-wishers and autograph-seekers, and he greeted most of them wordlessly, with faint smiles and loose handclasps. Jay-Z is not flamboyant in the way that rappers are expected to be flamboyant. He doesn’t have a gimmick, or an outlandish persona, or an especially fancy wardrobe. He usually wears a T-shirt and jeans, invariably made by Rocawear. He’s tall and lanky. His hair is shaved barbershop-close, and there is the hint of a goatee on his chin. Diamond earrings and a diamond pendant are the only indications of his fortune and, indirectly, his fame.
Jay-Z was born Shawn Corey Carter in 1969. He grew up in the Marcy City Housing Projects, a forbidding bastion in Bedford-Stuyvesant; he has turned the project name into a hip-hop brand name. (At a recent concert in Washington, D.C., he was introduced with the words “Marcy projects, y’all!”) He was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls, and was brought up by his mother, Gloria; his father left the family when Jay-Z was eleven. Jay-Z is among the few rappers who memorize rhymes without committing them to paper, but he says that as a kid he always kept a green notebook with him. “I used to write in it every day, at my mom’s house, banging on the table and saying my raps,” he says. When an older neighbor called Big Jaz got a record deal, Jay-Z left George Westinghouse Technical High School to become his sidekick. “He took me to London, and I was, like, ‘People pay you? To make raps? Oh, shit!’ ” After a few years, when it was clear that Big Jaz would never become a major rap star, Jay-Z left him to tour with Big Daddy Kane, a popular rapper whose career was beginning to decline.
Jay-Z returned to Brooklyn, where, he says, he spent his early twenties selling crack cocaine. He is vague about the specifics. “I was running the streets,” he told me, and that’s about as far as he would go. In song, he’s more forthcoming:
In 1995, after Jay-Z was shot at from six feet away, he decided to give rapping another try. A producer named Clark Kent introduced him to Damon Dash, a Harlem entrepreneur who had contacts in the rap industry, but no one was interested in signing Jay-Z. His old songs were considered too “sophisticated,” he told me. “You had to really like rap to be, like, ‘This dude’s clever: the way he’s using his words, the way he tackles his subjects—that’s different.’ ” So Jay-Z and Dash, along with a silent partner, Kareem (Biggs) Burke, formed Roc-A-Fella Records, to put out Jay-Z’s music themselves. Roc-A-Fella eventually struck a distribution deal with Priority Records (which it later left for Island/Def Jam), and issued Jay-Z’s first album, “Reasonable Doubt,” in 1996. A cheerful, filthy love song called “Ain’t No Nigga” became his first hit; it also launched the career of Foxy Brown, who rapped as Jay-Z’s girlfriend.
“Reasonable Doubt” is filled with rhymes as smooth as the hustlers Jay-Z sings about, and even the grittiest (or most exuberant) song suggests the poise and strength of a shrewd businessman. The first thing you notice listening to the album is the high, nasal voice, steely and precise; the enunciation is clear, and Jay-Z moves over each syllable lightly. The words pour out so effortlessly that rhyme and rhythm seem almost like an afterthought. His style is suggestive rather than declamatory; instead of shouting threats of murder, he sighs, “Believe you me, son, I hate to do it just as bad as you hate to see it done.”
“Reasonable Doubt” sold more than half a million copies, but in order to cross over to the pop audience Jay-Z needed catchier tunes. Rap songs are a combination of rhyming and “beats”—heavily rhythmic tracks built from synthetic sounds, live instrumental music, and samples of other songs. In 1997, Jay-Z tried to find a more beat-driven sound; the result was a disappointing album called “In My Lifetime, Vol. 1” (“I wish I could have nailed that one,” he says now) that sampled eighties rock songs such as “You Belong to the City” and “I Know What Boys Like.” Then, in 1998, he bought an unlikely beat from a veteran producer named Mark 45 King, which added a heavy bass line to “It’s the Hard-Knock Life,” from the musical “Annie.” Jay-Z slowed down his delivery to match the tempo, and the result was the crossover hit “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)”:
An accompanying album, “Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life,” sold more than five million copies, and made Jay-Z rap’s biggest star.
Jay-Z has made two albums since. “Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter,” was released in 1999, and “The Dynasty: Roc La Familia (2000- ),” a showcase for other artists on Jay-Z’s record label, was released last October. Since his first album, Jay-Z has simplified his intricate rhyme style: his lyrics have become less tightly constructed, and less descriptive—an approach that appeals to mainstream fans, who buy hip-hop for the beats, not the words. He explains by affecting the pinched voice of a casual, presumably white listener: “I’m from West Motherfuck. I don’t know what they’re talking about. But the music is good.” When I asked him if he thought the transformation was an improvement, he responded with an unsentimental comparison to Michael Jordan. “In his early days, Jordan was rocking a cradle, cranking it, all crazy, but he wasn’t winning championships,” Jay-Z said. “And then, later in his career, he just had a fadeaway jump shot, and they won six titles. Which was the better Jordan? I don’t know.”
In an earlier era, a rapper might have been tempted to ignore mainstream listeners, or to pretend to, but for Jay-Z sound business practice trumps artistic ambition. Still, no one wants to watch a man make jump shots forever—not even perfectly executed fadeaway jump shots—and so Jay-Z has to find a way to keep people interested, including aficionados. On “The Dynasty,” he rapped about a girlfriend’s miscarriage, and he and one of his protégés, Beanie Sigel, have written a pair of songs that berate their deadbeat dads. Songs such as these convincingly convey personal desperation, but they suggest a professional desperation as well.
In the beginning, hip-hop wasn’t “about” anything at all: it was invented not by rappers but by disk jockeys. In 1973, a Jamaican immigrant in the Bronx who called himself DJ Kool Herc popularized the art of manipulating two turntables at once, so he could repeat his favorite drum patterns over and over. The jumpy music that resulted was given the name hip-hop. D.j.s who performed regularly in parks or clubs or roller rinks began hiring m.c.s to extoll their skills to the crowd, drawing on the African-American tradition of street-corner rhyming. In the studios, when the first hip-hop records were made, d.j.s were sometimes replaced by live bands, and the m.c., or rapper, became central to the music. In 1979, a group of dilettantes called the Sugarhill Gang released a song called “Rapper’s Delight,” and it became a hit. “Hip-hop” had become “rap music.”
The first generation of stars were cartoonish figures from New York City—Kurtis Blow, Whodini, Run DMC, the Fat Boys, the Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J. They had whimsical names and wore whimsical clothes, and their records were filled with whimsical boasts. Run DMC proclaimed itself “the big, bad wolf in your neighborhood—not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.” Then, in 1988, Public Enemy, a Long Island collective, released an album entitled, “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” The group presented itself as a paramilitary outfit agitating for black power, and, just as the Beatles established the idea that pop songs could be art, Public Enemy established the idea that hip-hop could be politics.
Hip-hop has an insatiable appetite for new characters and new stories, and Public Enemy was soon overshadowed by a West Coast counterpart, NWA (or Niggaz with Attitude). NWA had a different arsenal of slogans—“Fuck tha Police” instead of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”—which were delivered in first-person tales of crime and sex influenced by nineteen-eighties storytellers like Too $hort, Slick Rick, Kool G Rap, and Ice-T (who named himself after the pulp novelist and ex-pimp Iceberg Slim). A new term was coined to describe this foulmouthed genre: gangsta rap. And yet, for anyone who follows hip-hop closely, “gangsta rap” isn’t a very useful term; over the past ten years, it has come to denote any rapper who talks about gunplay in the first person—and this includes almost every one.
Rappers may emulate businessmen these days, but they are still linked to crime and violence. The story of corporate rap starts with the murder of two of the most popular rappers of the nineteen-nineties: in September of 1996, in Las Vegas, Tupac Shakur (who recorded as 2pac) was shot and killed, and six months later, in Los Angeles, Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G. (or Biggie Smalls) was shot and killed; neither case has been solved. Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. followed NWA, putting NWA’s thuggish imagery to more personal use. On albums such as “Me Against the World” and “All Eyez on Me,” Shakur turned his life into an epic tale of self-sacrifice. Biggie was a superior stylist and a great narrator; he told his life story in a series of morbid jokes and pointed anecdotes. Both Biggie and Shakur celebrated money, but mainly they celebrated themselves, and you got the sense that they might have rapped for nothing, if they’d had to. The two had once been friends, but they had become embroiled in a seemingly baseless feud—it involved a mugging and, of course, a woman—when Shakur was killed.
The Notorious B.I.G. was a protégé of Sean (Puffy) Combs, a music executive who moonlighted as a rapper under the name Puff Daddy. In the summer of 1997, Combs initiated hip-hop’s big-money boom with a eulogy for Biggie called “I’ll Be Missing You,” in which he rapped over “Every Breath You Take,” the eighties chestnut by the Police. “I’ll Be Missing You,” which became the most popular song of the summer, seemed to be the paradigmatic story of hip-hop: a flashy businessman mourning a slain thug.
Most people thought of Puffy and Biggie as opposites—the executive and the thug, the businessman and the artist, the pop star and the rapper—but Jay-Z’s insight was to seize upon the avarice that united them. Rappers had long suggested that the music industry wasn’t much different from the drug world (as Biggie put it, “If I wasn’t in the rap game / I’d probably have a ki, knee-deep in the crack game”); now Jay-Z conflated Biggie’s eloquent thug and Puffy’s smooth executive to create the image of an utterly mercenary man who just happens to rap. In an industry characterized by pumped-up personae, it reminded the listener that rapping is nothing more or less than a job. And in the wake of two murders, that seemed like good news—and good business.
Still, it is tempting to believe that rappers are the deadliest rich people in the country, forever guzzling champagne and spilling blood, and the arrests that have accompanied hip-hop’s mainstream success have only reinforced this perception. In 1999, Combs was charged with beating a record executive with a chair, a telephone, and a champagne bottle (hip-hop has a weakness for leaden symbolism). The charges were later dropped. Recently, Combs stood trial for weapons and bribery charges in connection with a 1999 night-club shooting. (He was acquitted, but his protégé Shyne was convicted of assault, reckless endangerment, and gun possession, and was sentenced to ten years in prison.) Three weeks before the Combs shooting, Jay-Z was arrested for the stabbing of Lance (Un) Rivera, a record executive (and former friend) whom the rapper reportedly suspected of pirating his new album before its official release date. (The trial is scheduled to start next month.) In April, Jay-Z was arrested again; police said that his bodyguard had been found outside a night club with an unlicensed Glock 9-mm. semiautomatic.
Earlier this year, it was reported that New York police were “profiling” rappers, and last month the Senate held hearings on “media violence,” focussing on the world of hip-hop. Hip-hop is a particularly easy target for cops and senators, because rappers make their living by telling stories that sound like autobiography, and they do so in lyrics that are spoken, not sung. Six months before his most recent arrest, Jay-Z seems to have predicted it in rhyme, right down to the kind of gun:
Life rarely imitates art that faithfully, but the convergence of rap and rap sheet is so common in hip-hop that it was barely noted even by Jay-Z’s most vigilant fans.
To a casual listener, it may not be immediately obvious what makes one rapper better than another. But, like the generation of fans who dissected Bob Dylan’s lyrics and debated the merits of various bootleg recordings, rap fans pore over arcana in magazines and squabble about literary prowess online. On one hip-hop Web site, visitors recently debated “What is the hottest metaphor or simile ever written?” From the beginning, Jay-Z was admired for the quality of his verse. He compared his rhymes to luxury goods, as a way of flattering his listeners’ powers of discernment:
Much attention has been paid to rap’s content—the prevalence of words like “nigga” and “bitch,” the forthright treatment of sex and violence—but surprisingly little to the construction of the lyrics. And yet success in hip-hop has as much to do with style as with content. For much of the nineteen-eighties, rap was bound by strict metric conventions: each line had four beats, with the stress on the second and the fourth, and each verse was a series of couplets. Run DMC perfected doggerel in 1984 (“Cool chief rocker, I don’t drink vodka/But keep a microphone inside my locker”), and by 1988 the rhyme virtuoso Rakim had stretched the rules with tricky alliteration and run-on lines (“Music mixed mellow maintains to make / melodies for m.c.s, motivates the breaks”).
Jay-Z’s lyrics, on the other hand, sound like everyday speech. He throws in conversational tics—a little laugh in the middle of a line, or a pause, as if he were thinking something through—to heighten the effect. This style creates a sense of intimacy, which is undermined by a chilly sensibility, a frankly avaricious way of looking at the world, and an aversion to sentiment. In his best songs, Jay-Z exploits this contradiction by telling stories that balance a C.E.O.’s suave self-confidence with a memoirist’s introspection, using unpredictable rhyme schemes to keep the listener off balance. “D’evils,” from “Reasonable Doubt,” begins with a criminal’s monologue:
“D’evils” (the title is pronounced “da evils”) is a song about money and power, and it describes a world in which ambition is the root of all evil (and all success), a world where the criminal ethic—“We all tryna win”—sounds a lot like a capitalist code. In the second verse, we find a young hustler kidnapping a young mother, desperate to locate her lover, who has, it seems, betrayed him in a business deal. The hustler pays her to squeal, and there’s an implication of violence—“my hand around her collar”—suggesting that he might be literally stuffing her mouth full of bills: “About his whereabouts I wasn’t convinced. / I kept feeding her money till her shit started to make sense.” It’s a sardonic joke about the rap industry, which feeds its stars money and power in exchange for a convincing story. Jay-Z aspires to the hustler’s merciless attitude, but, as a rapper, he also resembles the kidnapped girlfriend, squealing for cash. Part of what makes “D’evils” compelling is this sense that Jay-Z’s persona—his professionalism—might be at odds with his profession. The first verse described d’evils as a criminal compunction; now it seems more like a narrative compunction—a disease that makes you talk too much.
If Jay-Z’s skill accounts for his reputation, and his practical approach to marketing his skill accounts for his success, then his ability to sense what his audience wants to hear before his audience senses it—to tell stories that don’t just demand belief but inspire it—accounts for his longevity. A few times a year, there’s a meeting in the Def Jam offices to decide what the next Jay-Z single and music video will be. Last year, after the release of “Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter,” none of the executives could decide what single to release. The obvious choice was “Things That You Do,” because it featured the pop singer Mariah Carey, but Kevin Liles, the president of Def Jam, thought it was “too mainstream.” Then support started building for “Big Pimpin’,” an unlikely candidate—its beat sounded North African, and it lacked a sung hook, which is generally considered essential for a hip-hop single. Liles, a convivial, round-faced man, and an energetic storyteller, recalled the conversation: “Jay said, ‘It’s a movement: This is how you big pimp.’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Jay.’ He said, ‘Nah, we gotta do a video. We gotta show people what big pimping is all about. Let’s make the movement.’ So I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s do it.’ And the rest is history.” The “movement” they created was this: Jay-Z on an enormous yacht somewhere warm, drinking champagne with women in swimsuits, and rapping about a life of sex and cash. As he put it:
The video cemented Jay-Z’s reputation as hip-hop’s smoothest hustler, and “big pimpin’ ” became slang for living large; Jay-Z even made a follow-up song, “Parking Lot Pimpin’.”
Expensive cars, yachts, champagne, and jewelry are everywhere in contemporary rap songs and videos. While hip-hop was once attacked for what was perceived as political rage, it has now given critics a different sin to excoriate: greed, or “bling bling” (after a song that asked, “What kinda nigga got diamonds that’ll—bling!—blind ya?”). Last year, Newsweek ran a cover story that announced, “Welcome to the bling-bling generation.” Hip-hop, the article claimed, had become “a Frankenstein’s monster—with fifty thousand dollars worth of white gold draped over its neck pegs.” (In fact, this characterization is inaccurate: most major rappers disdain white gold, considering it inferior to platinum.) Ever since the Sugarhill Gang rhymed about having “more money than a sucker could ever spend,” it’s been clear that hip-hop isn’t an ascetic culture, and in the late nineteen-nineties it became more infatuated than ever with earning power and spending habits.
“When everybody else was doing gold,” Jay-Z says, “I was, like, ‘I want something platinum.’ And then seeing the whole world switch—the whole world, you know what I’m saying? For a kid from Marcy? No one can take that away from me.” In hip-hop, achievement comes down to style: life style, musical style, rhyme style. Jay-Z has moved out of the Marcy projects and into a penthouse apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey (rich rappers inevitably move to the suburbs, for safety and privacy), which has a view of the Manhattan skyline and a private screening room. Roc-A-Fella Films has made a distribution deal with Miramax, and Rocawear, available at Macy’s, among other places, has replaced Phat Farm and Fubu as New York’s most visible brand. Jay-Z’s latest hit, “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me),” was a champagne-fuelled celebration song inspired by a birthday party for Kimora Simmons, the wife of Def Jam’s co-founder Russell Simmons. But, despite all his big-money rhymes and real-life wealth, Jay-Z has never once described what champagne tastes like. His is the pleasure of a man obsessed with status (he recently called himself a “status-tician”), rather than the simpler pleasure of a hedonist.
Hippies and punk rockers used to talk about artists “selling out,” chasing money at the expense of art. As the years passed, rockers got not only older but richer, and their newfound wealth was, inevitably, a bit of an embarrassment, or, at any rate, an absurdity: a rich society guy in late middle age singing about being a “Street Fighting Man.” Rappers, on the other hand, don’t sell out; they “fall off”—that is, they lose their artistic credibility and their financial viability at the same time. Punks (and their descendants in the world of underground rock) were afraid that big audiences and big money would ruin their subculture of authenticity, but in hip-hop success is a form of validation—a rapper’s riches are proof that he’s good at what he does. Platinum jewelry and platinum plaques are metaphors for artistic achievement, not just commercial success. It’s hard to imagine a major rapper refusing to make a video at the height of his career, the way Pearl Jam did. In hip-hop, stories are either convincing or they’re not; when a rapper loses his power to convince, it’s usually a failure not of authenticity but of rhetoric. Jay-Z will be a master criminal and a brilliant business mind and a great rapper until people stop believing him.
Jay-Z’s recent arrests have given him new material. He has even made a music video, for a song called “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” loosely based on the stabbing of Lance (Un) Rivera, in which he takes the witness stand, delivers a defiant defense, and celebrates his acquittal. But on a spring morning in a Manhattan courthouse, where Jay-Z was attending a scheduling hearing in the Rivera case, the discrepancy between Jay-Z the rapper and Shawn Carter the defendant couldn’t have been clearer: being on trial mainly means keeping your mouth shut, in the courtroom and outside it, and that’s exactly what Jay-Z did.
I arrived just in time to see Jay-Z sprinting up the steps to meet one of his lawyers, Murray Richman. It was the first time I’d seen him without a flock of handlers and bodyguards and managers and friends trailing him. I passed through the metal detector with Jay-Z and Richman, and as we got to the elevators Jay-Z turned around and looked at me, not quite smiling. “What’s going on?” he said.
It was not a day of high legal drama. The court date was a mere formality—a request for a postponement. There were only half a dozen other people in the courtroom; no reporters, no fans.
Jay-Z sat alone at a small desk before the bench, dressed in a Rocawear T-shirt and Rocawear jeans. The hearing took almost no time: the lawyers stepped forward and murmured to the judge. The judge murmured back, one hand over the microphone. Richman smiled broadly and said, “Thank you so much.” The postponement had been granted, and Jay-Z strode out of the courtroom. A few weeks later, a publicist from Def Jam called me. She told me that for “legal reasons” Jay-Z wouldn’t talk to me anymore.
As Jay-Z’s lawyers would be the first to tell you, rapping about crime doesn’t make you a great criminal. By the same token, rapping about money doesn’t make you a great businessman. Jay-Z is a part owner of Rocawear and Roc-A-Fella Films, but Damon Dash takes most of the meetings himself. “If I gotta bring Jay, that mean we got a problem,” he says. Jay-Z is more actively involved in Roc-A-Fella Records, which he intends to establish as hip-hop’s ruling family. In recent years, realizing, perhaps, that his own career won’t last forever, he has been shilling for Roc-A-Fella at every turn. “Y’all niggas truly ain’t ready for this dynasty thing / Y’all thinking Blake Carrington, I’m thinking more like Ming,” he rapped in a recent song. And yet he has had a rough time with his protégés: Amil, a young female rapper, left the Roc-A-Fella stable shortly after releasing a poorly received début album last year, and Memphis Bleek, a Marcy-projects alumnus, hasn’t quite found his own style or marketing niche. Jay-Z’s most promising protégé is Beanie Sigel, a hard-bitten twenty-seven-year-old, who is as forthcoming as Jay-Z is guarded. “My style is crack houses in South Philly,” Beanie says. “That’s where most of my life was written.”
The first time I heard “The Reason,” Beanie Sigel’s new album, I was sitting in an S.U.V. that was hazy with marijuana smoke. Half a dozen of Beanie’s friends and handlers were nodding their heads in unison, and Beanie himself was rapping along, offering running commentary: “Yo, we in church right now—this one make you get the Holy Ghost.” His first album had been uneven, but “The Reason” is one of the year’s best, full of verses knotted with syllables:
Sitting in a deserted pool hall in Chelsea later that night, Beanie recalled the day that a friend of a friend got him an audition with Jay-Z. “Meeting Jay was like meeting the perfect hustler,” he said. “It was like being a young kid on the block, when a dude drive up in a big Caddy and throw you the keys, like, ‘Park the car, shorty.’ It was like meeting that guy.”
Along with most of his hip-hop contemporaries, Beanie Sigel has internalized the rules of corporate rap—he explained to me that you have to have a “good marketing plan” when you’re “selling your product,” whether it’s music or crack. And yet he doesn’t come across like a C.E.O. If Jay-Z is a salesman, then Beanie Sigel is a product, a charismatic hustler who senses that part of his appeal is his roughness (he described himself as “all edges, all the way around, three-sixty”), a slick talker whose style emphasizes wordplay over plain speech. (He even answered some of my questions in rhyme.)
The new corporate rapper is intensely self-aware. Eminem has rhymed, with seeming amusement, about being a “commodity.” One of rap’s new stars calls himself Ludacris. Even Master P has recognized this changing atmosphere: his own career has slowed down, and his empire has fallen apart, but he’s found new success through his son, an eleven-year-old rap star named Lil’ Romeo. Maybe, after four years of corporate rap, the obsession with businessmen is turning into an obsession with products.
Fifteen years ago, a rapper might have called himself a “microphone controller” or a “rhyme animal”—epithets that called attention to lyrical skill. Today, rappers distract listeners from the fact that there’s any rapping going on at all, claiming to be pimps and thugs and cocaine dealers and businessmen and leaders and commodities. “Where I’m from, it wasn’t cool to be a rapper,” Beanie Sigel told me. “If you was a rapper, you was a sucker, straight up. So I kept it under my hat. I’d say, ‘Nah, man, I ain’t no rapper.’ ”
Beanie Sigel’s disavowal of rapping reminded me of something I’d heard before. Later that night, I pulled out his first album and confirmed a hunch: there’s a moment early on when Beanie tries to get rid of a fan by sneering, “I ain’t no fucking rapper,” as if he wished it were true. You can hear the same ambivalence in Jay-Z’s willingness to sacrifice complex rhymes for a good beat, in his insistence that “without rap I was crazy straight,” and in his half-serious threats of retirement: “Back to Shawn Carter the hustler, Jay-Z is dead.” The success of corporate rap has inspired a kind of self-loathing among rappers, who have begun to suspect that rapping itself is beneath them; if the hip-hop boom is drawing to a close, it can’t be said that the rappers didn’t see it coming.
It would be somehow fitting if rappers, who made d.j.s obsolete, ended by talking themselves into obsolescence, unable to compete with their own tall tales. You get the feeling that some rappers envy Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., who were killed mid-act, immortalized in character. Jay-Z has been talking about retirement ever since he released his first album, which he also claimed would be his last. He wasn’t planning to be a rapper all his life, and he certainly wasn’t planning to stay in the game long enough to fall off. He said that, having established himself as the consummate smooth criminal, he would move on—back, perhaps, to the streets. Like a gangster looking for one last big score, or a corporate boss angling for a lucrative buyout, he dreamed of quitting while he was ahead, of getting out before he was pushed out. That’s what the sound of “Big Pimpin’ ” is—a celebration before the falloff.
Rapping as a means to a financial end: this is the narrative of the era of corporate hip-hop. Strangely, it’s kept hip-hop interesting and exciting, because it has forced rappers to find new ways to talk about themselves, new ways to tell their stories. But for Jay-Z it poses a question: If you’re so good, why are you still rapping? As he prepares to release his sixth album in six years, he sounds apologetic. “Can’t leave rap alone, the game needs me,” he explains in his new single, and it’s true, for now. It won’t be true forever. ♦
