Jay-Z’s public standing amongst young people is so varied every time I bring him up. For people under twenty-five, they see him as Beyoncé’s husband with various adjectives thrust in front of that moniker. Young Black people might say he’s the king of grandpa rap or dad rap. Young white people almost always bring up Kanye or Eminem and proclaim them to be better while not understanding the hype. Mostly everyone young tries to call him a regional rapper with no commercial base outside of New York. I also saw a take that left my head spinning, someone said that Jay-Z makes “scaring the ho's music”. She was twenty-five. I’m twenty-three and that still doesn’t line up with the Jay-Z that was around in the aughts that I came to know. On the flip side, old heads have taken to his newer verses on wealth building and wealth accumulation with a fervor like they were given the holy grail. They think he continues to only get better and has been dropping the verses of his career. That to me also makes me scratch my head because while they’re good the content is also a bit stale.
Most of these takes are reductive. 4:44 is a better album than albums his contemporaries like Eminem, Nas, Kanye, or Lil Kim have put out in their old age and while it is a good album with standout tracks, I wouldn’t say that as whole it’s a classic, much less one of his best. “The Story of OJ” is a bit too sanctimonious, especially for someone that’s been under fire from the same neighborhoods he’s claiming to save by buying their property up. “Smile” is a heartwarming track about his mother that I think had good intentions to try and loosen the homophobia around hip-hop culture but didn’t fully click and while the title track “4:44” is a no holds bar apology that lists out everything he’s done to Beyoncé and their kids in a way that was very new for accountability in hip-hop it also almost felt too personal. “Bam” and “Family Feud” are certified bangers that, again, hits in a way that his contemporaries have seemed to have lost but it’s still not Jay-Z at his peak.
Jay-Z at his peak made music for gang bangers who wanted luxury and he also made music for the hoes. The man’s list of bangers is extensive. In 2002, he dropped The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse and it did numbers. Two of the three singles went top ten including “‘03 Bonnie and Clyde” the first in a long line of Beyoncé collaborations. The other single, “Excuse Me Miss” landed at number 8 on the Hot 100.
“Excuse Me Miss” is a smooth and more mature song than his previous singles like “Girls, Girls, Girls” or “I Just Wanna Love U” but doesn’t lose the essence of fun in the track that the other songs have. Jay’s work with The Neptunes in the aughts brought an elevated sound to hip-hop. When Jay worked with Ye or Just Blaze it had a soulful sound that also had a head banging aspect to it. Jay-Z’s earth shattering diss of Nas, “Takeover” produced by Kanye West, was built to be aggressive and strong. “U Don’t Know”, produced by Just Blaze, was another belligerent and macho banger of a track. That shit knocks today, I played it for an old head in an Uber once and he was bopping. But his work with Pharrell and Chad Hugo has a different take on hip-hop. It has a groove and bounce to it with an upbeat feel. Jay has a way of producing some really challenging music to listen to both sonically and lyrically, the stuff that feels dark or slimy or contemplative. With The Neptunes though, Jay typically goes for something that has more pop appeal and that’s not a bad thing. “Allure” and “Change Clothes” from The Black Album also fall in line with that sound.
“Excuse Me Miss” is a lush and seductive track that toes the line between R&B and Rap. Pharrell coos over the hook while Jay-Z spits game at the woman in the club. It samples “Big Poppa” by Biggie, “Take You Out” by Luther Vandross, and “Walk Don’t Walk” by Prince. The beat comes in and the midtempo feels perfect for lounging with a boo in the summertime and when Jay says “This is for the grown and sexy” at the start of the track, you believe it. It feels like a level up in maturity like how one feels after they graduate college and get their own place. You can’t listen to party headbanging music or music about the trials of life without something to offset that tension or set a different mood.
The track is great and the lyrics are much different from his 2000 track “Big Pimpin”. Three years later and at least on the surface, Jay-Z has a much different approach to picking up women, most likely due to his new and burgeoning relationship with who became his future wife. He raps about all of the luxurious things he has but how “Only thing missin’ is a Missus” and how she don’t “even got to do the dishes” (he has two dishwashers) and then gets into his persona of a player and dog. He talks about how he treats groupies like that cause they’re groupies but she doesn’t support the disrespect of them and gets angry but they work together because opposites attract. She sees him for who he is outside of the wealth and she’s flirting with him writing “smiley phases after all her phrases”. It’s cute! It feels more mature and he kept playing with that sound and theme for his next album The Black Album.
Jay-Z’s persona is always evolving. He went from drug pusher kingpin to a music and business mogul that had sharp instincts and promoted his music and business like it was a luxury item that deserved the price tag it had. Jay-Z was going platinum with singles and bragging about how others had “singles that were 99 cents/Mine was four bucks”. After The Black Album was released and he announced his retirement, there was a shift in Jay’s music quality when he inevitably returned (if a rapper says they’re retiring, they’re lying). Kingdom Come was largely boring and self-indulgent, American Ganster was a stronger return to form but doesn’t hold up with the classics from the ‘96-03’ run and while The Blueprint 3 had some great singles, it wasn’t great. But throughout all of the blunders, he remained on top of the game with respect given by every rapper that came after him. When Lil Wayne was starting to hit mainstream he kept calling himself the greatest rapper alive now that the greatest rapper retired. Kendrick Lamar put Jay on his Mount Rushmore of rappers. Kanye owes his career to Jay and also respects the hell out of him as an artist. Drake, Megan Thee Stallion, and Nicki Minaj all have paid their respects and given him homage. With a run like Jay’s from ‘96-03’, you’re always going to have that respect even if the other output isn’t up to par.
A couple of things changed how he was going to be perceived in the future. The first was streaming. Streaming music has caused an undervaluing of music every year that it’s been out. Paying ten to twenty dollars on a piece of art that someone spent months or years curating and creating is more than fair, especially with predatory labels taking the lion’s share of the profit but today most people look at you crazy if you buy a CD or digital copy because for ten bucks a month you can listen to anything you want over and over again and curate it to playlists designed to foster a mood or aesthetic you’re looking for. It’s incredibly convenient and also has cut the returns of music for artists by a lot, it’s not profitable for those with good record and publishing deals much less bad ones. Jay-Z and a few other A List musicians attempted to solve that problem by coming out with the streaming service Tidal. Tidal would pay musicians three times the amount that Spotify pays out per million streams. While it’s still up and active, it never became a major player. Jay-Z kept his whole catalogue on the service exclusively for years. It prevented a lot of young people from being able to go back and stream “Beyoncé’s husband’s” music or knowing why he was so lauded. The second was Lemonade. Regardless of the album’s themes of reconciliation and moving forward, Beyoncé effectively defanged Jay-Z’s persona of a mogul and unflappable titan within tracks two through six and cowed him enough to drop an album whose one of many themes was about repentance. He certainly seems less cool and more like a family man. And since rap is a young person’s game more than other genres, he’s distanced himself from the people of today. Everything now sounds like scaring the hoes music or, if you’re my roommate then, confusion about why he is perceived as so great. Jay-Z has also stopped playing to try and be seen as the cool guy or on the cutting edge of music.
Jay-Z still has classic albums and songs for days and “Excuse Me Miss” is one of them. Twenty years later and the track still holds up and sounds good when you play it. The man is still the GOAT for a reason.