American Gangster Movie Songs

[Argelia Long]

Thestory goes like this: After seeing an advance print of the Ridley Scott heroin-trade epic American Gangster, Jay-Z found himself inspired. The movie details the story of the Vietnam-era Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, and Jay saw so many parallels between Lucas's life and his own. Over the course of a few weeks, Jay recorded his own widescreen epic, a concept-album about the rise and fall of a gangster like Lucas, an imagined what-if trajectory for what might have happened to Jay if he'd never left the drug trade.

It makes for a good story and a great marketing coup. By attaching himself to a big-budget crime epic, Jay guaranteed himself cross-media presence and positioned himself to regain some of the grimy credibility he'd lost with 2006's Kingdom Come, the would-be comeback that found Jay rapping about brands so expensive most of his audience had no idea what he was talking about. In working to create the impression that he'd sacrificed commerce for art, Jay recast himself as an artist rather than a CEO, a canny commercial move at a time when rappers like Kanye West are outselling CEOs like 50 Cent. As a piece of media-manipulation, American Gangster is dazzling. But as music?

Well, as a concept-album, American Gangster is kind of a wash. Over the course of its first 13 tracks, the album loosely outlines the criminal rise and fall we've seen in so many movies: the desperation of youth, the excited early schemes, the slow hard-fought rise, the lavish celebration of that rise, the eventual joyless inertia involved in maintaining that success, the sudden and inevitable descent into a prison-cell anonymity worse than death. That story animates the album, but it doesn't dictate its movements. Throughout, Jay-Z breaks that narrative whenever he feels like it, taking care to force in all his standbys: The sneering aristocratic death-threats, the breezy uptempo party-songs, the (especially forced) for-the-ladies seduction-song.

Jay actually corrupts the impact of his own moralistic rise-and-fall story by ending the album with a pair of bonus tracks, "Blue Magic" and "American Gangster", that trumpet Jay's own triumph over the vast impersonal forces that landed his protagonist in prison. On "Blue Magic", he even growls, "Can't you tell that I came from the dope game?" like it's a point of personal pride, immediately after he depicted an inevitable criminal downfall. On his wide-scope art-piece, Jay still can't put aside commercial success and relentless self-aggrandizement, even if those twin impulses fuck up his concept.

So American Gangster doesn't quite work as a concept album, but it's difficult to imagine the record would be better if that concept had been fully realized and fleshed-out. Jay's evident obsession with the post-Don Imus furor over nihilistic rap lyrics has fuck-all to do with his gangster narrative, for instance, but Jay's willingness to break narrative and address that obsession leads to lines like this one, where he calls out recent rap foe Al Sharpton on "Say Hello": "Tell him I'll remove the curses/ If you tell me our schools gon' be perfect/ When Jena 6 don't exist / Tell him that's when I'll stop saying 'bitch,' bitch!" The album's story gives it enough structure to feel huge and all-encompassing, but Jay floats in and out of it as fluidly as he switches between the first and second person. And so the drug-dealer story serves an important purpose: It rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place.

On American Gangster, he's fallen back in love with language, making slick puns and jamming his lines with internal rhymes and vivid, detailed images without letting those devices detract from the emotional punch of his mini-narratives. "No Hook" has some of the most complicated rhyme-patterns he's tried in years, but it's all in service of a sad picture of the conflicts of anyone who makes a living doing dangerous, immoral things: "'Stay out of trouble,' mama said as mama sighs/ Her fear her youngest son being victim of homicide/ But I gotta get you out of here, mama, or I'm [long pause] die [long pause] inside." (Nobody uses long breathless pauses like Jay-Z; when he's at his best, as he is here, those silences can say as much as his words.)

On "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)", the buoyant and celebratory ode to financial success, Jay thanks every device and corrupt institution that made his rise possible: "The Nike shoebox for holding all this cash/ Boys in blue who put the greed before the badge." On "Blue Magic", his wordplay is so dense that it can take multiple listens to parse: "Blame Reagan for making me to a monster/ Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra/ I ran contraband that they sponsored." (Maybe I'm dumb, but it took me a while to realize that the second of those lines ends with the exact same four syllables as the next line's beginning.) On "Fallin'", the song about the dealer's comeuppance, Jay sounds like he's spent a lot of time thinking about the fate he avoided: "Come January, it gets cold/ When your letters come in slow and your commissary's low." And on "Ignorant Shit", a Black Album outtake revisited and revamped here, Jay positively relishes the contradictions of rap, a genre where every artist theatrically proclaims himself to be more real than everyone else: "Actually believe half of what you see/ None of what you hear, even if it's spit by me/ And with that being said, I will kill niggas dead."

Musically, American Gangster is lush and spacious. The sampled voices of Al Green and Marvin Gaye float through the record like ghosts of Jay's past, sweetly offering encouragement like benevolent angels. Jay's handpicked lineup of producers keep his voice grounded in thick, organic globs of 1970s soul. Diddy and the Hitmen, the reunited production who gave old Bad Boy albums their flamboyant elegance, turn in five tracks on the album, and their work drips with ambition. On album-opener "Pray" they outfit Jay with churning strings, screaming guitars, cinematic sound-effects, and a histrionic gospel choir; the horns, windchimes, and rolling drums of "Sweet" are almost exhausting in their richness. But not all the production is that warm and languid. On "Success", Jay and guest Nas rant paranoically over No ID's disorienting storm of organ-wails and murky, off-kilter drums. On "Ignorant Shit", Just Blaze layers up a furious storm of tinny synths and guitars, giving Jay's shit-talk a trashy "Miami Vice" veneer. And "Hello Brooklyn 2.0", built from an old Beastie Boys track, is a stark corrective to all those florid harps and violins: all booming bass and skeletal handclaps, Jay sounding more at home than guest Lil Wayne.

When Jay taped his episode of "VH1 Storytellers" in Brooklyn last month, he kept comparing tracks from the album to moments from The Godfather and Scarface. American Gangster isn't really about Jay's own memories, and it's certainly not about Frank Lucas. Instead, it's an album about Jay's mythic legacy, his place in a pantheon of larger-than-life outlaws. Problematically enough, it works because it reconnects Jay with the verbal and musical eloquence that allowed him to escape from an outlaw's life. If it took a big Hollywood movie and a half-baked concept to get him back to that, then thank God for big Hollywood movies and half-baked concepts.

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In the rap world of 2007, is there a more polarizing MC than Jay-Z? Chances are you'd be hard pressed to find a rapper with more disparity between his supporters and critics. With that being said, perhaps it is extremely appropriate that his latest project would be in the form of the equally polarizing "concept album." When executed correctly, the concept album can be an artistic masterpiece renowned for generations (see The Who's Tommy). Conversely, a poorly executed concept album receives scorn from critics and may alienate even the most dedicated fans (see The Smashing Pumpkins' Machina/ The Machines of God).

After viewing an advanced copy of Ridley Scott's portrayal of Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas in American Gangster, Jay-Z left with a concept in mind of where he wanted his next project to go. To anyone familiar with Hov's discography, the similarities between the film and Jay-Z's lyrical themes throughout his career are quite obvious. While Lucas' story was obviously on a much more grandiose scale, Jay-Z also claims to have been quite involved in the drug game before his success in rap music. With American Gangster, he examines the rise and fall of a New York gangster. While the album is in no way a classic like Tommy or The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it is a well-executed concept album, and musically one of the best rap albums of the year.

The concept of the album is enforced from the intro, containing samples from the film and philosophies on what it means to be a gangster. Following this is the first song, "Pray," which while objectively, is not a bad song, sounds a little dated in its production. However, aside from the slightly underwhelming beat, Jay-Z starts the album off on a decent tone because of strong lyricism.

From here, American Gangster starts to pick up the pace. The next track is entitled "American Dreamin'," and is both lyrically and production-wise one of the strongest tracks on the album. This song illustrates the dreams of a rising gangster perfectly, and stays true to the concept of the album perhaps better than any of the other tracks.

Following this song is a collaboration with Lil' Wayne. Like his collaboration with Kanye West on "Barry Bonds," here "Hello Brooklyn" leaves much to be desired. Given that the song features perhaps two of the top twenty MC's of the past ten years, the listener would expect much more than this product. Not to mention, the song seems to deviate from the overall concept of the album. Overall, the song is just mediocre and out of place on the album. However, this is the last major misstep on American Gangster.

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