(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Albums: #03: Jay-Z – The Blueprint (2001)

Is Jay-Z the best MC alive? Is he the greatest of all time even? The best answer is that he can be, when he puts his mind and soul into it. His wordplay is often phenomenal when he tries hard, and he’s one of the few rappers that can drop some knowledge on a club track if he wants to. Jay-Z’s albums before and near the turn of the century have featured tracks like “Soon You’ll Understand” and “Imaginary Player” and “Brooklyn’s Finest”, some of the deepest songs in hip-hop. But the question back then, is Jay-Z capable of releasing a whole album of these tracks? If so, when? September 11, 2001, that’s when, motherfuckers!

Before The Blueprint was revealed, Jay-z was releasing singles that weren’t really about anything: “Big Pimpin’”, “Can I Get A…”, “Change The Game”, “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)”. He made them hot because he had the rhyming skills and the money to pay for beats. But his first single off this magnum opus, “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”, runs a hidden message, a rarity for a hit mainstream rap song. The song is a personal memoir about his life as a crack dealer, a path in his life that he advises his listeners to not follow, on top of a sample-heavy Kanye West lively beat (Mr. West’s coming out party, by the way). “Hov' is back, life stories told through rap/Niggaz actin like I sold you crack/Like I told you sell drugs; no, Hov' did that/so hopefully you won't have to go through that.” It isn’t enough to make you bounce, it isn’t enough to slay the charts, he’s also determined to teach you life lessons.

The beats on The Blueprint are unfuckablewith, brimming with soul and packed with samples. He got a boost from Jackson 5 in “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”, Al Green in “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)”, The Doors in “Takeover”, and Natalie Cole in “All I Need”. And Timbaland? Just Blaze? Kanye West? If you want to trace back to where the sound of hip=hop of the zeroes came from, it all started here.

We can’t conclude without talking about Jay-Z’s rhymes; you can’t technically call someone the greatest MC ever solely on the strength of his beats. Thankfully, it needs no relentless persuading that The Blueprint is any less an artistic accomplishment because of its straightforwardness. He exhibits full ownership of the microphone—his ability to absolutely captivate, to elevate, to build and destroy. When Jay is rapping on this album, no other rapper even exists. He plows through killer track after killer track, turning from cheeky (“Girls, Girls, Girls”) to sensitive (“Song Cry”) to justifiably boastful (basically every song).

You can argue that there are better raps on Reasonable Doubt, but The Blueprint is Jay-Z’s best collection of songs. It runs like a greatest hits album, with the added bonus of that artist declaring his supremacy over the music world. This album generated a new order in hip-hop: Jay-Z was an empire now, and when he acted, he built his own physical existence. Shawn Carter said later on in “Empire State Of Mind” that he is this generation’s Sinatra, in which all of rap music was left to analyze what he did, and attempt to mimic it. This album was the beginning of that reign. The Blueprint was the template of how to construct a classic rap album in the zeroes: aural consistency, few guest appearances (just Eminem on “Renegade”), the love song, the diss song, the club throwaway. Looking back, the whole thing seems so calculated and sure enough, few following artists were able to trace his design and attempt to retain his impression of effortlessness. The keyword there is “attempt”, of course. Shawn Carter, he’s running this rap shit.