Decoded by Jay Z (review)

Working through the persona of Jay Z, Shawn Carter remains perhaps hip hop’s most successful artist and businessman. Like his rap lyrics, his best-selling 2010 memoir Decoded details how Carter transformed the hardships of poverty and his dangerous career as a crack dealer into a multimillion-dollar empire. His story, as he tells it, is the quintessential American Dream, Gatsby in sepia-tones.

Predictably, then, Decoded details Carter’s transition from indigence to wealth. While this story has its own interesting (and highly entertaining) dimensions, its narrative concept is far from novel. More genuinely intriguing is Decoded’s negotiation of race, class, gender, and place, as Carter’s identity shifts from poor black child to crack hustler to famous rap star to rich mogul to exceedingly wealthy cultural spokesman. Through the lens and voice of Jay Z, blackness, as both a performative and political construct, is achieved only through a “liberatory” (albeit predatory) capitalism. In ways that Jay Z refuses to acknowledge, his notion of capitalism as (post)racial triumph depends on pernicious distinctions within a racialized and gendered constituency of poor and working-class others. These distinctions, I will argue, rely on the most dubious premises underlying his dream narrative.

This reliance is most apparent in Decoded’s recurring efforts to normalize crack selling by juxtaposing the tenets of the drug industry with the operating maxims of any for-profit corporation. When comparing crack-dealing to working at McDonald’s, for instance, Jay Z declares that “[t]he truth is that most kids on the corner aren’t making big money—especially if you break their income down to an hourly wage. But they’re getting rewarded in many ways that go beyond dollars and cents. The kid on the streets is getting a shot at a dream” (75). This is a crucial claim for Jay Z. Hustling embodies the possibility of a dream; McDonald’s only offers the possibility of a promotion. Therefore, “[t]he only reason to [hustle] is for the top slot,” and “[i]f you’ve got the heart and the brains you can move up quickly” (75). Jay Z adds that “[t]here’s no way to quantify all that on a spreadsheet, but it’s that dream of being the exception, the one that gets rich and gets out … that’s the key to a hustler’s motivation” (76).

Notice, then, that the “hustler’s motivation” is predicated on the hyper-individualist impetus of the exception. Ties with and to the community are quickly abandoned in favor of “get[ting] out.” This emphasis on escape is obscured, however, by Jay Z’s insistence on speaking for the very same community (and culture) from which he quickly “moved up” and out. Hip hop and the Marcy Housing Projects in Brooklyn, New York thereby occupy ambivalent places in Decoded, as Jay Z exploits his relationship with these spaces in order to be recognized as an authentically learned cultural translator (read informant) operating at the behest of well-off white America.

Decoded, as Jay Z boldly asserts in the book’s epilogue, is not just a guide to understanding his lyrics or his life’s story, but rather the key to unlocking the pathos of all rappers. Jay Z declares that he “wrote this book” because he wants “people to understand what the words we use—and the stories we tell—are really about” (308). He thereby tasks Decoded with “tell[ing] a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history” (235). And it certainly is just “a little bit” of the story. Jay Z’s narrow vantage point on an entire generation’s struggle with crack cocaine rests on the thin line between the “the story of the rapper and the story of the hustler” (10). The scope and wherewithal afforded in this finite space tells the real missing story, which, to Jay Z’s mind, is “how young cats were...