Music - Hip-hop rappers are living on borrowed time
"Yeeeah," says Shawn Carter, "I know you just ripped the packaging off your CD. If you're like me, you're reading the credits right now . . ." These are the opening seconds of Jay-Z Vol 3: Life And Times Of S. Carter (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam). At the close of the track, following a muttered meditation on the parlous state of the world that he and we know, he says: "Five, ten years from now, you're gonna miss Jay-Z." It is a chilling remark, in the light of what has happened to more than one hip-hop star, and Jay-Z's own unfortunate brushes with the law. Like most of the leaders of the genre, Jay-Z's is a vio- lent persona. Whatever Shawn Carter is like in his real life, when he is Jay-Z, he is a hard, cruel man. His album is full of boasts of what will happen to whomsoever dares cross his path. What he wants he takes, by whatever means necessary. But he acknowledges, with icy insight, that there must be a bullet out there with his name on it. His fatalism is like an exhausted shrug of resignation, for all the feral energy of his delivery. This new record is a follow-up to an album which shipped more than 500,000 copies in four days and went on to sell more than four million in the US alone. As with all the giants of hip-hop, the sales figures are mind-boggling. Yet all the record sales in the world do little to assuage Jay-Z's rage. Carter might live to be 90, but Jay-Z is on borrowed time.
Hip-hop has fetishised violence because it cannot be happy. Disco was happy music; soul was righteous; gospel was uplifting. The rappers who populate hip-hop have no choice: they live in a world where the script says they are ruled by guns and fraternal alliances. The new single off this album, "Anything" (which uses a sample from the soundtrack to Oliver!), is not a declaration of fidelity to a friend or a lover (much less to a fan) but an unsmiling expression of solidarity with "my niggers", the posse of players who are on Jay-Z's side. There are an enormous number of words on his album - it runs for 74 minutes, and there are voices present almost all the time - but the ones which jump out at the listener are calculated to frighten us. Jay-Z makes voyeurs of us all, especially when he gets to "Is That Yo Bitch", which is about that age-old situation of men squabbling over a woman. Delivered at a pace which is so fast that the words are almost impossible to decipher, Jay-Z demands satisfaction.
Despite the epic length of most hip-hop records, they're never conceived in a long-form way. This one moves from moment to moment: the digital seconds tick off without recourse to old-world stuff like bar lines, verses or choruses. There are no real melodies here - just little twists of song, bled dry of their sweetness through obsessive repetition. It's a music of catchphrases, of obliterating impact: the eye of it bounces around the stuck-needle beats like a squash ball. Silly little kazoo or flute riffs pop out of the sound: anywhere else they'd be absurd, but here they're sardonic call-signs, signature licks sampled off old records as if to say, OK, we'll stick some pop thing in here just to sweeten your poison. Now listen to this.
Something in the record never quite lets you forget that, for all its gothic gloom, Jay-Z's world is only a movie of some sort. At one point, he says: "Just imagine if I put my heart in this shit? Scary sight." There is always some distance between Shawn Carter and Jay-Z, just as there is a distance between Jay-Z and us. But the real-world violence of hip-hop goes on. The distance may be disappearing. To what extent will these players let life imitate art ?
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