Decoded

From Barnes & Noble

T his disarmingly honest autobiography by rap legend Jay-Z is now an enhanced paperback edition, containing new lyrics and annotations.

— David Garber

From the Publisher

“Compelling . . . provocative, evocative . . . Part autobiography, part lavishly illustrated commentary on the author’s own work, Decoded gives the reader a harrowing portrait of the rough worlds Jay-Z navigated in his youth, while at the same time deconstructing his lyrics.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“One of a handful of books that just about any hip hop fan should own.”—The New Yorker

“Elegantly designed, incisively written . . . an impressive leap by a man who has never been known for small steps.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“A riveting exploration of Jay-Z’s journey . . . So thoroughly engrossing, it reads like a good piece of cultural journalism.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Shawn Carter’s most honest airing of the experiences he drew on to create the mythic figure of Jay-Z . . . The scenes he recounts along the way are fascinating.”—Entertainment Weekly

Michiko Kakutani

…gives the reader a harrowing portrait of the rough worlds Jay-Z navigated in his youth, while at the same time deconstructing his lyrics, in much the way that Stephen Sondheim does in his new book, Finishing the Hat…Decoded leaves the reader with a keen appreciation of how rap artists have worked myriad variations on a series of familiar themes (hustling, partying and "the most familiar subject in the history of rap—why I'm dope") by putting a street twist on an arsenal of traditional literary devices (hyperbole, double entendres, puns, alliteration and allusions), and how the author himself magically stacks rhymes upon rhymes, mixing and matching metaphors even as he makes unexpected stream-of-consciousness leaps that rework old clichés and play clever aural jokes on the listener…
—The New York Times

Library Journal

Rapper/mogul Jay-Z presents the lyrics to 36 of his songs, and provides their fuller autobiographical and cultural context.

Kirkus Reviews

Accommodate. Dwindle. Suspicious. Obscene. We owe these and a few dozen other words to William Shakespeare, who coined some, twisted others into new shapes, heard still others in the mouths of bricklayers, milkmaids, merchants and shepherds in the English countryside. Moreover, Shakespeare mastered whole technical vocabularies, drawing on the language of sailing, of falconry, of hunting, of painting.

The corpus of Shakespeare's work, quantified, contains 31,534 individual words—or, as the helpful authors of the textbook Statistical Reasoning for Everyday Life put it, "a grand total of 884,647 words counting repetitions." But that doesn't seem a great deal, given that the English of our time contains, arguably (and scholars do argue about the matter, endlessly), a million words, great numbers of which are coinages in neoscientific Latin (by way of example, look up ibuprofen sometime).

Yet, considering the efforts of scholars such as C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in the 1930s to reduce English to a mere 850 words, the better to transport the language to every corner of a waiting world, Shakespeare's trove seems more than sufficient. He got literature out of his stock of words, after all.

And so did Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, who, 50 years ago, crafted an unforgettable children's book, Green Eggs and Ham, from a stock of a mere 50 words.

The story has it that Seuss, visiting publisher Bennett Cerf in New York, happily remarked that he had used only 225 individual words in a previous book, The Cat in the Hat. Not impressed, Cerf—himself a writer of children's books, most consisting of bad jokes that continue to poison my mind half a century later ("What's big and red and eats rocks?" "A big red rock eater.")—bet Seuss that he could not write a complete story using only 50.

Seuss returned with Green Eggs and Ham, which contains precisely 50 words, all but one of them ("anywhere") consisting of a single syllable. The tale is a simple one: A strangely shaped mammal named Sam (or Sam-I-Am) exhorts an unnamed friend to try a delicious plate of green eggs and ham. Rightly suspecting any egg that, even after cooking, remains green, said friend adamantly refuses, saying, "I would not eat them with a fox. / I would not eat them in a box. / I would not eat them here or there. / I would not eat them anywhere. / I would not eat green eggs and ham. / I do not like them, Sam-I-Am."

Pure poetry, that. Green Eggs and Ham was published in August 1960, just in time for me to count it among the earliest books I read, and it has gone on in the half-century since to become, by most measures, the fourth-bestselling children's book in the English language, making for good commerce as well as good literature.

If only Shakespeare had been so economical. We might today be reading Green Eggs and Hamlet.

—Gregory McNamee

The Barnes & Noble Review

The name of Jay-Z's first book is Decoded, a curious title given that among the work of celebrated rappers his lyrics might need perhaps the least decoding. Unlike the Wu-Tang Clan, for instance, whose arcane allusions, slang neologisms, and syncretic philosophies have spawned two books and counting, Jay-Z is decidedly plain spoken and confessional. His most powerful lyrics -- and there have been many since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt -- reveal anxiety, uncertainty, and an uncanny awareness of human frailty to go along with the expected bluster and bravado of the rap idiom.

Despite Jay-Z's willingness to bare his emotions in song, we know precious little about the man himself, Shawn Carter. The general arc of his life's narrative is clear: a child of Brooklyn's Marcy projects transforms himself from aspiring rapper to drug hustler to global superstar to corporate mogul. He is the self-made man of American myth, remixed with a kick drum and a snare. Under the guise of his invented name, Jay-Z has become less person than persona. As he once rapped with characteristic concision: "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man." Though he's released a staggering eleven albums in fourteen years, the man behind the business still remains a mystery -- often seen, but rarely heard.

That is what makes Decoded such an unexpected and welcome gift. At over three hundred pages, it is a multimedia, multi-genre extravaganza: part memoir, part coffee table book, part annotated compendium of lyrics, part polemic in the defense of hip hop's poesy. Jay-Z (with the aid of the respected hip-hop journalist dream hampton) intersperses personal anecdotes, rhetorical broadsides, and deep reflections with rich images and typography. From Andy Warhol's striking "Rorschach" on the book's front cover to the interior art, which ranges from Michelangelo's "Pietà" to a vintage Little Orphan Annie button, the book is a visual feast.

What the book isn't -- and what many hip-hop fans have long anticipated -- is a tell-all memoir. Though rich in anecdotes, the narrative is organized thematically rather than chronologically, underscoring the continuities across Jay-Z's career. The themes range from poverty to fame, from sports to politics. At times, these subject-driven sections leave one dissatisfied with the level of revelation and reflection, such as in his cursory treatment of race relations. Combined, though, they provide a penetrating glimpse into the mind of one of the greatest American artist-celebrities.

As a collection of lyrics alone, Decoded is an essential contribution. It joins a growing body of works, such as Paul Edwards's How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC and Yale University Press's The Anthology of Rap (which I co-edited with Andrew DuBois), that place the rap lyric in its proper context within the American popular songbook and the broader tradition of poetry through the ages.

Jay-Z is a rapper who famously doesn't write down his lyrics -- or as he once termed it, "the only rapper to rewrite history without a pen" -- and seeing his words on the page is a revelation. Syllables and sounds bounce off one another; clever figures of speech unfold before our eyes. Throughout the book, he continually makes the case for understanding rappers as poets, complex artists capable of rendering the familiar unfamiliar, embodying paradox and tension in their lyrics, and making things beautiful -- and ugly too -- as artists at their best always do.

"Turning something as common as language into a puzzle makes the familiar feel strange;" he writes, "it makes the language we take for granted feel fresh and exciting again, like an old friend who just revealed a long-held secret. That's why the MCs who really play with language [. . .] can be the most exciting for people who listen closely enough, because they snatch the ground out from under you. . . ." Decoded will do just that, upending assumptions about hip-hop and leaving readers suspended in midair, staring down at a new and complex ground beneath their feet.

--Adam Bradley

Adam Bradley is the author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop and the co-editor of The Anthology of Rap.