The ##

Tonight we will be engaging in a comparative study of two works that bookend the time period that has interested us over the past week. The first is titled “Juicy,” and it was released by the artist Christopher Wallace in the days when Warren Moon was playing quarterback for the Oilers. The second is titled “Empire State of Mind,” and it was released by the artist Jay-Z in the more recent days of Valerie Jarrett and [sic] Kesha.

Both are masterful pieces of art. Case closed. The claim I would like to advance, though, is that they occupy analogous places in the careers of these two artists and, more interestingly, that they reflect, and reflect on, the state of R&B/Rap in their respective eras.

In the transition from “Juicy” to “Empire State of Mind,” we see the ripple effects of a sea-change in Rap. When Wallace began in the business, there was no business. Rap was a grungy, low-down activity of the extremely poor. There was little that was flashy or popular about it. It made little money, and it led nowhere. When Wallace reflects that “it was all a dream,” the line is believable. And when he discusses his rise to the top, it is a story filled with shortcoming and real hardship. He often says that, all along, he thought he would achieve fame and riches, but one surmises that this was a pipe dream — until just about the point when it wasn’t.

Jay-Z, by contrast, lived in Wallace’s shadow, and benefited immensely from the progress that Rap made in the years before he came on the scene. Jay-Z was like Obama to Wallace’s MLK. Jay-Z lives in an era when to rap is to be a celebrity. Wallace always struggled to differentiate himself from the streets — for Jay-Z, the major problem has always been establishing that he has anything at all to do with the streets. It is perhaps because of this anxiety that he notes, in one of the first lines of the work, “But I’ll be hood forever.” Of course, if you are hood forever, you don’t have to say things like this, and the fact that he claims to be the New Sinatra in the next line of the work in fact just undermines the claim to street cred that he has just made. For Jay-Z, starting out in Rap, it wasn’t a question of whether or not the whole business was a dead end. It was just whether he would be one of the guys that made it huge. He was, of course. Congratulations. But “Empire State of Mind” is an anthem of a generation of rappers who by and large experienced nothing but success — all the popularity, none of the uncertainty. Thus, while both works explain the rapper’s rise to the top — how it happened, why it happened, what it is like — it is a very different rise, and a very different top, which these works describe.

It is with these considerations in mind that I think we have to admire the work of Christopher Wallace more than the work of Jay-Z. There are aesthetic considerations to think about when assessing a piece of art. But there are also ulterior motives, like courage, context, and authenticity. And in these categories, the contribution of Christopher Wallace to Rap seems to me more valuable than the undoubtedly virtuoso work of Jay-Z.

So, without further ado. The greats.

(PS. Sorry I couldn’t spend more time on this, guys. Got a paper due pretty soon. Hopefully in future days, we can re-examine the preliminary claims made here.)