Honestly man fuck Jay-Z. He was my favorite rapper back when he rapped about toting guns to the Grammys and popping bottles on the White House lawn but his influence in the 21st century has been completely detrimental in my humble opinion. He made it corny to write your rhymes down and made fitted hats match with button down shirts. He made disaffected cool the default stylistic mode for a certain breed of rapper thereby setting the emotional spectrum of East Coast hip hop back at least a decade and leaving a bunch of sad broke huffy 40 year old men trapped in a prison made of Avirex jackets saying things like heat on the counter like a microwave for all of eternity. He made horrible music with Linkin Park and Coldplay and The Roots for no other reason than to appeal to the worst sorts of white people, the ones who still hate rap and probably black people too. He tried - and of course failed - to shut down autotune, the catalyst for some of the most thrilling vocal innovations the genre has seen since Kool Moe Dee first invented fast rap on the toilet in the ‘80s. He reduced tragic and conflicted geniuses like Biggie, Pac, Kurt and Basquiat to mere props in his quest to become the type of corporate boardroom dickhead they all would’ve rolled their eyes or spat at. He promoted the myth of attaining some sort of objective individual greatness through hip hop over the very realistic goal of community growth. He made compromised crossover the principal ambition for an entire generation of would-be serious rappers. (As opposed to, say, Puff or P who were unapologetic capitalists but who never once pretended to be great artists.) And worse than all of that he forgot how to rap well along the way.
I know he is a role model for a lot of people who mistakenly think personal liberation can be achieved through fame and monetary wealth and hey if that is what is getting you through your day then live that day with pride but from where I am sitting everything he has done post-retirement falls somewhere between pathetic and destructive. Except I did like it the one time when he said “I’m afraid of the future.”
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theartofmadeline
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