Word: jayed
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Like running backs and child actors, rappers usually do their best work in the first year or two of their careers. The inevitable decline is brought on not by bum knees or embarrassing arrests--in rap there's no such thing--but by something far more mundane: words. Jay-Z's aptly titled classic What More Can I Say is more than 800 words long, and when it's over, you know everything you could possibly need to know about him. (By contrast, James Blunt's pop ballad You're Beautiful has fewer than 200 words, half of which...
...Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) seemed to know he had cheated the odds when he announced his retirement in 2003. Then 34, he had lived the Ur-rap narrative--make tapes, launch a label, buy a De Beers diamond mine--and bragged about it on a dozen often brilliant albums. But no rapper is immune to the pull of the mike, and on Kingdom Come, his heavily hyped comeback, Jay-Z tries to subvert the problem of having said everything by saying everything a little differently. Where once his delivery had the ring-a-ding-ding smoothness of Sinatra--another vocalist...
...bold maneuver, and when Jay-Z combines it with real attempts at acknowledging his place in rap and in life on 30 Something ("I don't got one gun on me/ Gotta sum on me to hire a gun army/ Getcha spun like laundry/ And I'll be somewhere under palm trees/ Calmly listenin' to R&B"), Kingdom Come seems destined to become rap's first genuinely adult album. But those moments are just flashes between Jay telling rap's new kids to get off his lawn and reminding the rest of us that he's still a thug...
...bold maneuver, and when Jay-Z combines it with real attempts at acknowledging his place in rap and in life on "30 Something" ("I don't got one gun on me / Gotta a sum on me to hire a gun army / Getcha spun like laundry / And I'll be somewhere under palm trees / Calmly listenin' to R&B") Kingdom Come seems destined to become rap's first genuinely adult album. But those moments are just flashes between Jay telling rap's new kids to get off his lawn and reminding the rest of us of that he's still...
...Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) seemed to know he had cheated the odds when he announced his retirement in 2003. Then 34, he had lived the ur-rap narrative-make tapes, launch a label, buy a De Beers mine-and bragged about it on a dozen often brilliant albums. But no rapper is immune to the pull of the mic, and on Kingdom Come, his heavily hyped comeback, Jay-Z tries to subvert the problem of having said everything by saying everything a little differently. Where once his delivery had the ring-a-ding-ding smoothness of Sinatra-another vocalist...