The Billionaire’s Lament: How the World Changed Around Jay-Z.
His three-comma aspirations inspired millions. But what now, when billionaires are under fire?
As the summer of 2020 draws to close, it’s clear the world has changed in unprecedented ways. A pandemic, its ensuing economic fallout, and a broad-based racial justice movement—not to mention the toxic, repressive administration that serves as their backdrop—have disrupted our lives in ways we scarcely could have imagined. If ever there was a moment for hip-hop to realize its promise as a political and cultural corrective, it’s this one. Throughout the week, LEVEL will be publishing stories that examine the summer of 2020 through the lens of hip-hop — from its relationship to the world at large to its own structural issues.
Jay-Z and Pharrell’s recent song “Entrepreneur” once would have seemed impossible. Not because it was released in conjunction with a Pharrell-curated issue of TIME magazine or because it tackled ideas of financial independence and generational wealth but because the idea of a Jay-Z verse was met with a collective groan before the song even came out. Something that used to be so highly anticipated has become fodder for arguments over paths to freedom and signs that the greatest rapper alive is out of touch with the current movement. Shawn Carter’s prosperity gospel, the same thing we used to lift him up for espousing, has now become his greatest detriment.
Rap is an artwork based on aspiration. Rappers making music about the nature of what it means to live as Black people in America couched those revelations in the hopes of what it means to transcend those circumstances. If rap is the hood CNN, as Chuck D has always proclaimed, it’s also been the hood HGTV where we can hope for the million-dollar houses of our dreams. In fact, the “first” rap song — or at least the first one fed to the rest of America — “Rapper’s Delight” has Big Bank Hank rapping about a Lincoln Continental and a sunroof Cadillac.
To be continued...
