Shawn Carter, Robert Zimmerman and Context in the Power of Art

"This was a shitty year before it got so much shittier, and one way it was shitty was that it was subpar musically." - Robert Christgau, Pazz & Jop 2001


Two of the best albums of the Aughts sold next to nothing on their mutual release date. That should be doubly shocking since they were also far and way the two best albums of that year. But both "Love and Theft" by Bob Dylan and Jay-Z's The Blueprint went on sale on a certain jewel-clear Tuesday in September of 2001. For obvious reasons, I delayed purchasing these CDs, but it wasn't long until I found myself down in the music department at the shitty record/electronics store whose name I can't remember that used to be on 15th Street and Union Square West before it went bankrupt and made the decision to get back on the music-purchasing-and-listening horse. It was a strange time, and I found that I kept requiring permission from myself in order to enjoy the basics of life: you have permission to take pleasure from food; you have permission to admire the forms and faces of females; you have permission to purchase and enjoy new albums by musicians whose work you have begun to appreciate.

Plenty of artists have addressed the aftermath of what happened, a few have attempted to grapple with the actual events, and many more have stuck their fingers in their ears and shouted permission to enjoy life despite everything, but Jay and Bob got the last words in before the paradigm shift. Except that we didn't hear them until after, which increased their power exponentially.

"Love and Theft" is, like most Dylan albums, an apocalyptic romp. There are a couple of ballads and blues, but most of the songs are mid-tempo or better, while the lyrics are black-humored explorations of paranoia, failure, revenge and superstition. Imagine listening to a great blues band improvising an autobiographical song cycle while floating down a flooded Southern river on a leaky raft - I know it's a lot to imagine, but that image and the simultaneous joy and despair inherent in it were Dylan's gift to me during that brutal winter. For example, here's the fourth verse of "High Water":
High water rising, six inches above my head
Coffins droppin' in the street like balloons made out of lead
Water poured into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm gonna do
"Don't reach out for me," she said, "Can't you see I'm drownin', too?"
It's rough out there. High water everywhere.
Unlike, say Bruce Springsteen with "The Rising," Dylan wasn't responding to the day's news when he penned "High Water," he was just expressing his usual laconic attitude towards the world in its sorrow and its frivolity. Yet the second line above took on prophetic dimensions in the weeks after The Falling Man and his companions. The gallows humor of the fifth line's exchange turned the pervasive mood of the city - roughly We're All Gonna Die But Fuck Them I'm Not Moving And Fuck You I'm Hurt But Fuck Me Because You're Hurt Too But It Doesn't Matter Because We're All Gonna Die - into a bitter, funny punch line.

I didn't know what to expect out of The Blueprint. I'd only started listening to rap with any kind of seriousness the previous year, so my knowledge of Jay-Z was limited to his guest verse on Biggie's "I Love the Dough" and the inescapable but not particularly impressive "Can I Get A..." until "Izzo" dominated the summer of 2001. I bought the album because of "Izzo" and the Eminem guest spot on "Renegade." I knew enough about Jay to figure that not every track was going to bridge pop and rap as easily as "Izzo," but while his reputation at the time was based on his strength as a hitmaker, I figured that anyone capable of stealing a verse from Big (which he does on "I Love the Dough") and coaxing a guest spot out of Eminem (difficult at the time) must have some chops.

Damn.

The Blueprint doesn't have any of my Top 5 favorite Jay songs and very few of my favorite verses, but it is the distillation of everything I love about him. His cool wit, palpable arrogance, absolute comfort in his own skin and refusal to find anything impressive other than, maybe, himself - it's all there in super concentrated form.

So words of wit, arrogance, confidence and cool acquired extra power because they were recorded before September 2001 but I didn't hear them until afterwards? Yes. To elaborate: the stuff that came after reeked of false bravado, warrior songs or artificially bright smiles. Even "Hey Ya!", as flamingly hot a pop song as has ever been recorded, seemed in 2003 an attempt at levity in the face of the steamrolling shitstorm that was the Bush Administration. Jay himself burned all the goodwill he'd built up in my book when he appeared on and produced Cam'Ron's execrable track "Welcome to New York City," which reminded everyone that New York was 'the home of 9/11/the home of the lost towers/but we ain't never stopped bangin'/we ain't never lost power.' But while summer faded to autumn and then as winter fell, the cocky joy of Jay occasionally brightened my mood. The third verse of "Hola Hovito":
If you haven't heard, I'm Michael, Magic and Bird
All rolled in one - cause none got more flows than Young
Plus got more flows to come
And if I ain't better than Big, I'm the closest one
So move over - hoes, choose Hova
My food for thought so hot it give you dudes ulcers
There's something so beautifully American about these lines even today. The obsession with excellence and striving - Jay compares himself to the best rapper he can think of and then, two lines later, strings together ten words for one of the best rhymes on an album chock full of them. The fact that, to Jay here, nothing matters more than acclimation as the best rapper alive. Let Mos Def concern himself with the plight of the world, let Eminem try and deal with censorship and hypocrisy, let The Wu-Tang Clan advance their mythology, let OutKast try and walk the razor edge between hip-hop and pop, but give Jay-Z the title, the belt and the crown.

Being a big fish no matter the size of the pond has always struck me as a quintessentially American ideal - it doesn't matter what you win, so long as you win. Of course, buried right in the middle of Jay's boast is the literally enormous counterweight, in the form of Christopher Wallace. Jay might be the best rapper alive, but it's because his friend is dead. And for J-Hova too, the paths of glory will lead but to the grave.

One of the principal attractions of music is that, like smell, it works like a time machine. I've written before how quickly and completely music can transport me, but what was unique about "Love and Theft" and The Blueprint was their ability to put me back in a time that was just as lost as that conjured by Pet Sounds or London Calling, despite the freshness of its passing. I would snap the plastic CD center around the spindle of my Discman and listen to Jay's exuberant nihilism or Bob's good-humored fatalism and marvel at their capacity to describe a world and a feeling that was unimaginable when they stepped into the studio. I listened with the fascination of one who receives a voicemail from a spouse who is killed in a traffic accident on the way home to these final dispatches from the carefree America in which I was raised, now consigned to the ever-receding past.