Listening back to all his albums, it’s striking how much musical ground he’s covered from slick New York boom-bap to Timbaland future-funk meditations to Swizz Beatz Casio stomps. And I even discounted the soundtrack to his near-unwatchable hood movie Streets Is Watching, since he only showed up on about half the tracks. I left off the live Unplugged album, where the Roots so masterfully backed Jay up. But I left off all the various compilations of his work. And I’ve also counted 2000’s The Dynasty: Roc La Familia, billed as a Jay-Z album even though it was more of a Roc-A-Fella crew effort. I’ve included all four of his collaborative long-players, even the inexplicable live-mashup thing he did with Linkin Park. Writing this thing, I’ve had to puzzle out what constitutes a Jay-Z album. And his donation of “Is That Yo Bitch?” to Memphis Bleek ranks as one of the great acts of charity in recent memory. 1 compilation - a crew album from a crew that he wasn’t even part of. “Jigga My Nigga,” one of his most iconic singles, belongs to the Ruff Ryders Vol. He’s given great tracks like “Who You Wit,” “Hey Papi,” and “Excuse Me Miss Again (La La La)” to the soundtracks of deeply shitty movies. Even with that prodigious output, many of his most important moments have been on other people’s songs, or on albums other than his own. For a while there, he was steadily cranking out a watershed album every year, and evaluating his entire catalog is something of a messy task. And he’s always seemed like one of our greatest rappers mostly because he was so convinced of his own greatness. But he was mythologizing his own story even as that story was beginning. Jay’s great topic, in recent years, is his own meteoric rise from the corner to the Barclays Center owners’ suite. And even in his least inspired moments, he hasn’t stopped standing out. In the midst of a ridiculously fertile moment in New York rap, he still stood out. This Jay was not even remotely hungry or uncertain in his rap style, and his whole bespoke-kingpin character may not have been too different from his actual self.
And when the fully formed Jay showed up on Reasonable Doubt, he showed the sort of unearthly confidence that debuting rappers so rarely display. As legend has it, Jay spent most of his time, in those years, amassing an honest-to-god fortune dealing drugs. And he appeared on tracks with guys like Big L and Mic Geronimo. He spent a little while on the road with Big Daddy Kane, putting in hypeman duty, and even showed up on a 1994 Kane posse cut. And between that moment and 1996, when he released his stately and ridiculously assured debut album Reasonable Doubt, Jay more or less disappeared. Back in 1990, an extremely young Jay-Z showed up wiggita-wiggitaing all over “The Originator,” a single by his fast-rapping buddy the Jaz.
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