A Week With Jay-Z's "Kingdom Come": Day 3
30 November 2006
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
Jay-Z was featured on Dateline last night. Of course, as these television magazines work, he was interviewed by a rigid older man, reciting lyrics back in a robotic standard and asking the hard news questions: Does he think he’s God since he calls himself Hova? Is he sure he doesn’t think he’s God? Aren’t some of his lyrics degrading to women? What does he think about one professor’s claim that hip-hop and rap don’t add anything to the world but misogynistic bullshit — that it’s vapid garbage? The interviewer wanted explanations for these rhymes coming from a former drug dealer who’s now an executive at Def Jam and is meeting the the United Nations to make clean drinking water available for everyone. He said that after seeing basketball players in third world countries just wipe off a basketball that had bounced into some “mud” — actually human feces just running along the courts and streets like brooks — as if it was no big deal, he realized that the projects he grew up in weren’t the lowest. There’s a lot more depth in Jay-Z than he might be given credit for. He’s highly intellectual and he makes it obvious in all of his songs. He can’t play an instrument or read music, but he can pin together melodies that could make classicists blush their brains off. They’d think he’d cheated. Perhaps there doesn’t have to be any other reason for this less club-ready album than the truth — which is floated all over Kingdom Come — he’s grown up. He’s dangerously close to being a 40-year-old man. Sure, he still looks like a boy, with the chubby baby cheeks, the 22-ish face and the sexy young girlfriend, but he’s not young. He’s seen more than an encyclopedia. He’s panoramic. He’s a paragon of language usage. He says late in Kingdom Come that he’s young enough to know which cars to buy and grown enough not to get rims put on them. It’s a bigger statement than one might think. On the record is still that fascination with superheroes — he’s Samuel L. Jackson’s character in “Unbreakable” in many ways, the references to Superman, Peter Parker, the Batmobile, etc, but he’s got time on his side. He’s not a young man anymore, pretending to know it all, but at the same time, he’s smart enough to know that he doesn’t know anything either. On so many of these songs we hear the little pearls of wisdom that he’s plucked from his wild life come to the party and yet there’s the sophisticated understanding that he’s just getting started. Maybe that’s why he’s back. This is his life’s work. On “30 Something,” he might just deliver the line of the album — a statement that shows his perogative — saying, “I’m afraid of the future/Ya’ll respect the one that got shot/I respect the shooter.” That is not about violence. That’s about maturity.
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