Word: rapped
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...return to the rap game should come as no surprise: his retirement was one of the most half-assed in retirement history. He continued to record hits with Beyoncé and an ill-conceived EP with Linkin Park at a distinctly un-retired pace. But unlike many other stars that have come back only to efface their own legacies with sub-par performances (Why, Jordan, why?), Jigga still shines on his “comeback” album...
...self-proclaimed “King of New York” has moved beyond the standard gangsta-rap subject matter to talk about more personal and pertinent issues: the Hurricane Katrina crisis, his relationship with Beyoncé, his retirement, his mother and father, his falling-out with former friend and business partner Damon Dash, and even his recently deceased nephew...
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...
...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 who made...
...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...