Jay-Z’s evolution into the bridge between hip-hop and mainstream popular culture has been a long one, but his nostalgic turn worked to make him a figure whose mythos will likely endure into the old age of a generation.

Too Young to Let Go: Jay-Z, Medicare, and You
By Josh Timmermann

Jay-Z’s 10th studio album, American Gangster, is intended as a cohesive, conceptual companion piece to the Ridley Scott-helmed Denzel Washington/Russell Crowe vehicle of the same name, a biopic of Harlem crime lord Frank Lucas, but that doesn’t really matter, at least for our purposes. I like the record a lot—more than the three that preceded it, less than The Blueprint, Reasonable Doubt, and Vol. 3…The Life and Times of S. Carter—and yet I probably won’t bother with the ostensible source film, since I haven’t enjoyed a Scott movie since Thelma and Louise and I‘ve never been nearly as taken with De Palma‘s Scarface as most rappers and rap fans seem to be. But that doesn’t matter either.

Why? Because if you have no prior knowledge of the album’s big-screen inspiration going in, you’ll still get roughly as much out of it as you would if you’d dropped ten bucks to see the flick. American Gangster might be Jay’s best excuse for cold-shouldering iTunes, chatting it up with Charlie Rose, and gradually transitioning from post-retirement productivity into rap’s Randy Newman, but to these ears, this just sounds like a particularly good Jay-Z record. It’s certainly no coincidence that Jay selected this movie to base his new record on. Specifically, high-drama gangster mythology (namely, his own, natch) is his raison d’etre. More generally, though, nostalgia is Jay-Z’s great subject.

On last year’s hit-or-miss Kingdom Come, Jay declared “30 the new 20”—even though he’s actually pushing 40—and meditated on the virtues of Grand Theft Auto PSP and beach chairs, while enlisting his then-25 year-old girlfriend for what sounded like a Dreamgirls outtake better left on the cutting room floor. On the would-be comeback record’s finest moments (the Dr. Dre-produced “Trouble”, most stunningly) Jay sounded urgent, in and of the moment, but for the most part he coasted on a larger-than-life swagger that felt more removed than ever from the street-level narratives with which he made his name. In other words, “when your friends is Chris and Gwyneth”, you aren’t Tony Montana anymore. You’re just Al Pacino.

The Blueprint marked a major turning point, in more ways than one. It’s widely considered his masterwork, give or take his debut, which some hardcore hip-hop heads persist in citing. At any rate, for those of us who have, at some point, subscribed to Spin or Rolling Stone, but never to The Source or XXL, Jay’s 2001 effort was his case for a prime spot in a musical canon not headlined by Big, Pac, Rakim, and Nas. Subsequently, he’s been mashed up with the Beatles, Pavement, and Weezer, kicked it official-like with Linkin Park and Bono, taken a CEO position with hip-hop’s most famous label, and sold millions of records to consumers who might not own a dozen rap CD’s by rappers not named Jay-Z. For both mixtape-obsessed genre diehards and folks who bought the Fort Minor album, he’s come to represent rap with a captial ‘R’ like no single artist before him in the history of the form. What The Blueprint also represented, albeit rather more subtly, was the genius logical next step in the evolution of Jay’s charming hustler persona, a finely tuned character that, up to that point, had grown only in baby steps—“22 Two’s” to “Can I Get a…” to “Big Pimpin’”. Over expertly designed soul samples that would soon make a household name of one Kanye West, Jay made the shrewd move that would define the second half of his career and secure his early canonization: he looked back.  He looked back at the first-names that shaped young Shawn Carter (“Mickey cleaned my ears, Annie shampooed my hair / Eric was fly—shit, I used to steal his gear”); at Richard Pryor and Ike and Tina Turner; at the diverse ethnicities of all the lovely ladies he wants you to think he boned on his way to the top.

Of course, this wasn’t the first case of Jay spinning Dickensian yarns about his hard-knock past, but there was something discernibly different this time around. For one, Jay was nearly on his own on the mic; the album’s lone prominently featured guest rapper was Eminem on “Renegade”, a classic back-and-forth rap duet that he should’ve just saved for the spottier double-disc sequel. More importantly, however, he sounded less like a dude adding touches of flash and color to his memoirs, and more like the narrator of a personal history that has come to feel like it occurred all of a lifetime ago. Or, to invoke Jay’s mentor, maybe it was just a dream, runnin‘ the streets “like drunks run street lights“ and tears he can‘t see coming down his eyes? It’s the closest thing in hip-hop to a grand Proustian statement, and its best line goes like this: “Police pursued me, chased, cuffed, and subdued me, talked to me rudely / ‘Cause I’m young, rich, and I’m black, live in a movie”.

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