Decoded

For the holidays I got Jay-Z's new book, Decoded. Part autobiography, part collection of thoroughly annotated liner notes, part coffee table art piece, this book is undeniably and wholly Jay-Z. I was around friends and family for a few days and I promised myself I wouldn't hole up with the thing, but one day later and I'm halfway through it. Here are a few thoughts.

Right off the bat, I consider this a seminal and important book, not just about Jay-Z, but about the music, culture, and industry of hip hop, specifically East Coast hip hop. For a genre and culture that has spent decades slowly gaining credibility with critics, too few excellent books have been written on hip hop. (More on this later.) Alternatively, Jeff Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop is a book many fans and academics consider the book on the music, which leans heavily toward West Coast. (Chang, who I love, is from California.)

Oliver Wang, another California hip hop devotee who I deeply respect, recently posted on soulsides that he considers the new book The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop to be "one of the best books ever written about hip hop." His list includes Chang as well as The Book of Rap Lists, but leaves out Tricia Rose's Black Noise, notable for its early publication (1994), its compelling critique of the rap industry, and Rose's treatment on misogyny in rap. This book doesn't get enough credit.

But Wang left Decoded off that list too. Jay-Z's career again and again sums up hip hop's relationship with white audiences, and the release of what is essentially an art book to give new perspective to his career is the perfect show-and-tell here. Jay-Z writes believably about hip hop defined his experience as a young black boy in New York and then about how his commitment to reaching a wide fan base does not, in his opinion, compromise his integrity as an artist. What Jay-Z leaves out (so far), but what everyone knows (including Jay) is that rap's primary industry target is young white adolescents and teenagers.

But now Jay-Z is on Fresh Air, ribbing with Terry Gross, and releasing a book that teenagers will not buy nor really understand. The man has broken into a demographic and is communicating directly with an audience that rap has largely ignored: white adults. How many rap artists can claim that? I mean artists who are still putting out solid music. No disrespect to Chuck D.

The truth is that lots of hip hop artists, and not just the so-called socially conscious ones, share a worldview very similar to whites who read the New York Times. . Jay-Z writes, "New Orleans was fucked up before Katrina. This was not a secret. The shame and stigma of poverty means that we turn away from it, even those of us living through it, but turning away from it doesn't make it disappear." When I read a line like that, I think of my suburban parents, Times Magazine in their laps, turning to me a week after Katrina telling me this was a social and government disaster more than it was a natural disaster. They might not have gone as far as "George Bush hates black people"-- but they weren't far off. The same parents, though, wouldn't hear shit from me when I tried to explain why I believed an album like Illmatic defined a generational experience as much as The Beatles or Marvin Gaye.

The crazy thing about Jay-Z is that, with the release of this book, with his interviews, with his legitimate business status, people like my parents can listen to him and begin to "get it". Just like middle-aged HBO viewers can watch "The Wire" and suddenly have an intense sympathetic and nuanced view on the toll that poverty and addiction take in Baltimore, now white adults can finally begin to see what many kids of all colors have been saying for some time: rap tells an important and complex story about a part of America whose voice is typically skewed, if not altogether silenced. Jay-Z, for all his self-promotion and braggadocio, is a major force today in getting that message out.