Old Bull

There’s an old joke that’s not really funny. You’ve probably heard
it at least once; Liz Phair even turned it into a song a long time ago.
It always goes something like this: An old bull and a young bull are
standing at the top of a hill, looking down at the herd below. The
young bull turns to the old bull and blurts out: “Hey! I got an idea.
Let’s run down this hill and fuck one of those cows!” There’s a pause,
and then the old bull finally says: “Listen, kid, I’ve got a better
idea. Let’s walk down this hill and fuck all of those cows.”
It’s not the kind of joke that would make anyone except the very drunk
or the exceedingly imbecilic laugh out loud. But the older I get, the
more I realize that, like the cliché goes, this joke is funny
because it’s true. And it’s impossible to understand Jay-Z without
realizing first that he is the old bull in this joke.

Pay attention to this: The president of
the United States is a Jay-Z fan. Let me repeat that, because you need
to really think about it: The president of the United States is a
Jay-Z fan. That’s the kind of shit that science-fiction writers
would never write because it seems too weird to be plausible. Also too
weird? That incredibly awkward moment, two weeks ago, when Jay-Z tried
to teach Oprah Winfrey how to freestyle. Everything about it, from
Jay-Z’s ugly cardigan sweater to Oprah’s painful inability to act like
a human being, seemed to be the kind of YouTube-clip-making
embarrassment that would seriously injure any other rapper’s
credibility. Could you imagine 50 Cent, that preposterous cartoon of a
rapper, trying to act like a gangsta after yukking it up and talking
about institutional racism with Oprah? It would be like a public
castration. But Jay-Z walked out of it unscathed. He even scored the
one true moment in that entire clip. When the generic backing beat
started, he condensed the act of freestyle down to its most basic
statement: “It’s almost like double Dutch,” Jay-Z said. “You gotta stay
in the middle of that.”

Jay-Z has stayed in the middle of that for almost 15 years now. A
15-year career is an impossible thing in his line of work. In hiphop
terms, he should be dead, or a fossil buried deep in someone’s dusty CD
collection, or a star in his own family-friendly movie franchise by
now. But he’s still breaking out albums that make everyone else stop
and pay their respects—more on that later—and he’s still,
somehow, at the top of his game.

When I think about Jay-Z, I don’t think
about him in terms of modern hiphop. I think about him the way I think
about enormous figures like Elvis Presley, or Johnny Cash, or Neil
Diamond. He’s bigger than everyone else; he’s more than a recording
artist. He’s less flesh and blood, and more the living embodiment of
the ideal hiphop success story, from his early days hustling crack
cocaine to his apprenticeship under the Notorious B.I.G. to his
transformation from Biggest Rapper in the World into the successful CEO
of Def Jam Records to his “I Declare War” concert, in which he
basically put an end to the feud narrative in modern hiphop. And his
story hasn’t ended yet—there’s his marriage to Beyoncé
Knowles (making him the envy of virtually every heterosexual man on the
planet), and the public snubbing of Cristal champagne after racist
comments by the company’s director, and the flashing of 500-euro bills
in the “Blue Magic” video (leading some economists to seriously
question whether the American dollar had lost its cachet), and there’ll
be something else next week and next year and the year after that.

It’s not that he reinvents himself, Madonna-­like, whenever he
gets bored. It’s more that he’s consciously allowed himself to evolve
as an artist and a figurehead, and his story is beginning to emulate
(and occasionally improve upon) some of those great figures on the
Mount Rushmore of pop music. Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond both sought
out Rick Rubin when they were shadows of what they once were, and Rubin
acted as a kind of musical fountain of youth. Jay-Z went to Rubin when
he was at the height of his powers, and he came away with “99
Problems,” which is maybe the best rap single of all time.

Much of Jay-Z’s genius is that he figured out how to age in what
remains a very young man’s game. Popular music is the music of youth,
but he doesn’t try to hide his age, calling himself “Gray Hova” in a
few post-­retirement tracks. Rap is very much about swagger, and
Jay-Z’s lackadaisical flow and big-picture visualization means that he
plays the old bull to everyone else’s horny, eager young bull. After
Tupac and Biggie died, ­Jay-Z realized that murder was bad for
business, and so he did away with it. Just like that. He can go from a
hoodie and baggy pants to a ten-thousand-dollar suit in a five-minute
costume change and nobody blinks. He compares himself to Frank Sinatra
all the time—twice on his new album—and he doesn’t get
laughed out of the room. The president can cop a move from an old Jay-Z
video at an election rally and a stadium full of people will go
wild.

That old-bull mentality has kept Jay-Z relevant in the age of
digital music, too. Whereas the stuffy Beatles estate tried to sue DJ
Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album into nonexistence, Jay-Z
correctly saw it was the future and embraced it. Some of the best Jay-Z
work of the last five years has consisted of fan edits: There’s Max
Tannone’s Jaydiohead album, in which Jay-Z pushes against the
suburban ennui of Radiohead and comes away looking livelier, and
somehow more life-affirming, than the rockers. Viva La Hova combines Jay-Z with the mediocrity of Coldplay and pulls out what many
people consider to be the best mixtape of 2008. And there’s the
Brooklyn Soul album, which backs the rags-to-riches story of
American Gangster‘s narrative with a marvelous selection of
Marvin Gaye horns, making all those times Jay-Z compared himself to
Sinatra into a prophecy.

And the official,
unmolested-by-­armchair-­DJ Jay-Z product is still pushing into
interesting places. Jay-Z lost his footing with Kingdom Come,
the first album after his ill-fated retirement, but the return-to-form
thrills of 2007’s American Gangster (classic Jay-Z
self-mythologizing posing as Frank Lucas biopic) made for one of the
best albums of his career, and one of the best hiphop concept albums of
all time.

His newest, The Blueprint 3, might not please critics who
are looking for the sheer pissed-off prizefighting fury of “Takeover”
from the original Blueprint album, but it’s much more
interesting than a rehash of places Jay-Z has already conquered.

Whereas most bands can’t age in rock and roll without hiding behind
millions of dollars of smoke and lighting equipment to distract
audiences from the 50-year-old man in too-tight pants wriggling around
nostalgically on an arena stage to the same songs he danced to when he
was 20, Jay-Z has gone a long way toward proving that an artist can
intelligently and gracefully age in hiphop. Half the tracks on The
Blueprint 3 practically qualify as easy listening—the
opening song, “What We Talkin’ About,” opens with synth that could just
as easily back up Hall & Oates, and the last track, “Young
Forever,” is the softest thing Jay-Z has ever made.

But Jay-Z is man enough to know that just because he occasionally
makes soft music doesn’t mean he’s gone soft. “D.O.A. (Death of
Auto-Tune)” is an attack on half the industry—”I know we facing a
recession/But the music y’all making gonna make it the Great
Depression.” Even though it occasionally veers into Andy
Rooney–style get-off-my-lawnism (“You nigga’s jeans too tight/You
colors too bright/Your voice too light”), he’s still smacking the young
ones across the face and reminding them that he owns them (“I’m a
multimillionaire/So how is it I’m still the hardest nigga here?”).
The Blueprint 3 could serve as a blueprint for the next 10
years of Jay-Z’s career. It’s hilarious and full of both swagger and
the verbal barbs to back up that boastfulness, and none of it feels
like a lie. He may be getting old, but this album is a warning flare to
the world that he could do this shit forever.