Jay-z The Black Book Pdf

[Maribeth Seagers]

Evenwatching on TV, you could feel the energy in the room shift. His brow furrowed, one hand in his tux pocket and the other holding the all-black Dr. Dre Global Impact Award Grammy, with his eldest daughter, Blue Ivy, by his side for support, HOV said he was "honored" to receive the award. He thanked Dr. Dre, who was in the house, and the Grammys' Black Music Collective for their support and philanthropy.

Jay's protest rightfully got personal. As Beyonc looked on in support in the audience, Jay cited that his wife "has more Grammys than anyone and never won album of the year. So even by your own metrics, that doesn't work." Of course the cameras panned to Bey, icy platinum hair flowing from under a cream colored cowboy hat looking stoic, serious, solid.

As the point of Jay's words crystallized, it was clear he was chiding the Recording Academy for historically sidelining Black artists. When he commented on how some artists who get nominated and win each year don't even deserve to be in certain categories at all, ripples of laughter and shock rolled through the crowd at the shots he was taking. But Jay shrugged off the responses by saying, "When I get nervous, I tell the truth."

In selling this promise for over 65 years, the Recording Academy has successfully marketed itself as the center of the recording industry when anyone tracking the impact Black artists have made to invent, remix and reverberate music forward would see it is not. By partaking in the awards, an artist sacrifices some of their power to push against the Grammy's socially imagined gravitational force.

As a fan, the remedy to feeling frustrated or short-changed when the Grammys get it wrong is to simply not watch the show. But as a Black artist, submitting yourself to the institution for its level of verification, the response when that promise is left unfulfilled goes deeper than frustration.

Aside from Jay's award being one of the few times hip-hop was highlighted at all during the broadcast, Black artists throughout the night had to negotiate, in familiar ways, the bitter with the sweet. When Killer Mike took home three Grammys for best rap album, best rap song and best rap performance, he literally hit a church stomp onstage and ecstatically told the crowd it was his childhood dream to be up there. But Mike didn't have much time to cradle his new hardware, as he was arrested at the awards ceremony following an altercation and charged with misdemeanor battery.

Victoria Mont, who was up for seven awards heading into the show and took home the award for best new artist during the broadcast, noted in her acceptance speech that the climb to this stage was a 15-year pursuit for her, one that was filled with seasons of doubt and rejection by the industry.

Luminate Data's 2023 year-end report notes that hip-hop remains the most-consumed genre, and Afrobeats is the fastest growing genre being streamed in the U.S. But the newly created best African music performance Grammy, which went to Tyla for the viral hit "Water," was not featured during the telecast. And while Burna Boy made history by being the first Afrobeats artist to perform during the primetime show, his set time was noticeably shorter than others.

This relationship between the Recording Academy and Black artists has always been a tightrope walk-type quest for legitimacy that, even with recent strides in diversifying the voting pool, still falls short. As it was reported last year, some voters rationalized not casting their ballots for Beyonc's Renaissance for album of the year because they mistakenly believe she wins in the major categories so often. Over the years, hip-hop and R&B artists have vocally declined to submit their work for the Grammys' judgment. But in the case of big names like Drake rebuking the big show, his words come from the luxurious spot of already having been to the mountaintop of a Grammys podium before.

So, if the Grammys need Black artists more than Black artists need the Grammys, when will they be at the point of fully breaking away? The contradiction that lies in Jay's speech is trusting the institution at all. What Black artists learned "doesn't work" is showing up, presenting their best and striving for approval in spaces that do not wholly give it to them.

Black genius is rarely recognized in the present. The Grammys will still have room for redemption as long as Black artists still decide to subject themselves to it. Just as Toni Morrison's peers rallied for her to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 decades after her breakthrough novels, just as Angela Bassett was given an honorary Oscar in 2024 after a decadeslong career of exemplary performances, just as the Recording Academy has given Kendrick Lamar best rap album for every LP he's dropped since they missed the mark in 2014 with Good Kid M.A.A.D City, with Jay's level of influence and this public a call-out, the Academy will likely/probably/maybe give Bey AOTY one day in the future. Or maybe the Academy will even name an award for her, to honor the star's cross-generational contribution to music. Maybe they'll make it Renaissance-era chrome instead of all black. But by the time that future comes, will she be there to accept it? Will the praise even ring true? Not if, as a whole, the Academy continues to play in the face of Black art.

Since the release of their collaborative album, Watch the Throne, Jay-Z and Kanye West have received some criticism for their ostentatious display of wealth at a time when most of the country is dealing with the hardships of a recession. Their showboating rhymes have inspired a discussion about the need for the millionaires to tuck their wealth, as well as an Otis-sampling response from hip-hop great Chuck D, in which he calls on his colleagues to "reflect the people better". Indeed, the album is laden with remarks about expensive cars, jets, vacations and the like; it's what Kanye aptly dubs "luxury rap." While this kind of braggadocio may seem particularly inappropriate during an epoch of economic hurt, I can accept it for what it is as far as pop music goes -- well-produced, self-aggrandizing rap about things most people can only enjoy vicariously. It's when the proponents of "luxury rap" try to posit their having and spending large amounts of money on superfluous things as something more, however, that I tap the brakes on the imaginary Maybach. What is this I hear about black excellence?

One of the tracks that gets cited as a pillar of "consciousness" on the album is "Murder to Excellence," a two-part number that segues from a lamentation on black-on-black murder into what Jay and 'Ye deem to be "a celebration of black excellence." The first half of the track is peppered with mentions of Black Power Movement orator and icon, Fred Hampton ("I arrived on the day Fred Hampton died / Uh, real n*ggas just multiply"), and 20-year-old Pace University student, Danroy Henry Jr., who, like Hampton, was shot and killed by police. Throughout this part of the track, Jay-Z and Kanye successfully conjure up the energy of protest, embodied by their straightforward lyrics, the staccato drumbeat and the a cappella vocals that dance over it. "Power to the people. When you see me, see you," Jay-Z proposes.

"It's a celebration of black excellence. Black tie, black Maybachs," Jay-Z announces as the track swiftly shifts into a different rhythm. He then delivers a verse about what he introduces as "black excellence, opulence, decadence," with the inevitable line about his American Express black card. Kanye tags on some less boastful (and seemingly more thoughtful) bars, which include his customary momma-i-made-it affirmation of success by way of access: "In the past if you picture an event like a black tie / What's the last thing you expect to see? Black guys."

Complete with Kanye signing off at the end of his verse ("black excellence, truly yours"), the latter half of the track finds the two rappers positioning themselves as representatives of black excellence -- positions they are worthy of, apparently, by virtue of their material wealth. This depiction of black excellence as a matter of entrance into the echelons of the super rich is divergent from, and discordant with, the tradition of black struggle that they reference on this track as well as elsewhere on the album: Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, Corretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr. dawn the chorus of the next song.

One of the principal themes of the black power tradition that Kanye and Jay-Z continually evoke is that of collective struggle. The figures they name, while not identical in their ideologies, did believe in international solidarity amongst oppressed communities, and in empowerment from the bottom-up. "Power to the people" was about the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the proletariat coming together to access their power. "The people" are common, and they are excellent, as individual activists, educators, intellectuals, and workers, and as an organized whole. How do the people fit into Jay's and Kanye's plutocratic vanguard?

With the talk of tuxes and sheepskin coats that plagues the supposedly "excellent" half of "Murder to Excellence," the track morphs into a claim on black excellence that is decidedly elitist, and frankly, incongruous with the philosophies of the movements and the thinkers that are celebrated elsewhere on the song and album. Whereas the track begins as a memorandum of black struggle, it ends in a conundrum. "Murder to Excellence" may sound like a tribute to black struggle, power, and excellence, but it is a departure from the true meaning of the rhetorical symbols it's couched in. By resting on the lavishness of their lifestyles to define their excellence, Kanye West and Jay-Z make it clear that it will depend on "the people," the over 94% of us who can't gloat over multimillion dollar assets, to "redefine black power" and name the future of black excellence.

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