Washington also had a similar vision of community uplift through labor that never materialized, because the white South never truly adhered to its side of the bargain Washington offered-submission to Jim Crow in exchange for peace. “The Jew, who was once in about the same position as the Negro is to-day, has now complete recognition, because he has entwined himself in America in a business or industrial sense,” Washington wrote in I ndustrial Training for the Negro in 1904. Frederick Douglass predicted that just as Jewish people had “risen” despite discrimination in Europe, “in like manner the Negro will rise in social scale.” Carter is also drawing on an old tradition of using American Jews as a model of a downtrodden people who found success in America. Washington through the Black Power movement to the Nation of Islam and beyond. There’s an old strain of black capitalism here that runs from Booker T. Responding to prior criticisms in his book Decoded, Jay-Z wrote that “when I use lines like this, I count on people knowing who I am and my intentions, knowing that I’m not anti-Semitic or racist, even when I use stereotypes in my rhymes.” It’s beneath Carter, a writer and artist of astonishing ability and sophistication who has every reason to know better. But the line is nonetheless startling because it invokes the anti-Semitic canard that Jews maintain financial control of everything you see. “‘The Story of O.J.’ is really a song about we as a culture, having a plan, how we’re gonna push this forward,” Carter said on iHeartRadio. You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.”Ĭarter’s admonition is meant to encourage black people to imitate what he perceives to be a Jewish strength of ethnic solidarity and financial prowess. On one jarring line, Carter states, “You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit. Perhaps the most concise and perplexing statement of Carter’s new unambiguous love for capitalism comes in a couplet on the second track, “The Story of O.J.,” a song whose main theme is the indelible force of racism against black people regardless of class.
Carter is not at the height of his lyrical prowess on 4:44, but the album is ambitious and emotionally vulnerable, and represents a profound shift from Jay-Z’s previous offerings, especially in its belief in the power of the market to improve black lives rather than destroy them. He offers a new vision of capitalism as a tool for community uplift. Appropriately enough, 4:44 begins with the metaphorical assassination of the Jay-Z persona as Carter takes on the responsibilities of fatherhood, marriage, and wealth. The tension between Jay-Z’s love of the game and his fear of losing his soul, his indulgence in worldly pleasures as the years ripped away friends and family through death or betrayal, formed the emotional core of every Jay-Z album from Reasonable Doubt to The Blueprint 3. He gives his mother space on the album to speak about the years she spent hiding her sexual orientation. He imagines himself on the other end of the knife he used to stab the director Lance “Un” Rivera in 1999. On Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z’s ideal relationship was one in which fidelity was optional on 4:44, Carter raps movingly about the devastating realization that someday, his children will learn of his transgressions.
The contradiction of that transition is that while Shawn Corey Carter’s politics have simplified in disappointing ways, that’s come with an emotional maturity Jay-Z never had. The Football Game That Transcends Tradition Syreeta McFadden Perhaps the one thing he didn’t expect was that it would have a happy ending, one with wealth and family, fame and fatherhood. He saw clearly that his pursuit of success visited countless cruelties and indignities upon himself and those around him, and that his triumph would come at unimaginable cost. Jay-Z used the terms of finance to describe the drug trade-referring to his crew as his “staff,” his organization as his “conglomerate,” smoothly transitioning from acknowledging the violence of the trade to comparing it to the stock market (“drug prices up and down like it’s Wall Street homes, but this is worse than the Dow Jones, your brains are now blown”), and connecting the inequality of the system that shaped his life with his determination to triumph over it. Jay-Z argued that there was something revolutionary in this, in a black man born in the projects proving himself a better entrepreneur than white men born into plenty, as if to suggest the infinite human potential destroyed by the circumstances he escaped. Until 4:44, Jay-Z’s albums could be understood as an indictment of the immorality of capitalism by a man luxuriating in its fruits.
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