Sunday, October 7, 2007

Jay-Z: American Gangster (Preview Pt. II)

"L'chaim," Jay-Z pronounced, holding up a shot of Patron rum, joined by the dozen or so journalists he'd invited to his Roc the Mic Studios in NYC on Friday evening. The Hebrew toast struck me as oddly apt: Simchas Torah, the Jewish holiday celebrating the first day of reading the holy scriptures, had ended just hours earlier, and here I was sitting with Jay-Hova, the self-proclaimed God Emcee, moments after he'd blessed us with his latest divine words.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The sacred writ he shared with us before those Patron shots was American Gangster, the concept album he's planning to release Nov. 6. The unmastered tracks he played for us were missing verses here and there, and he's still mulling over the album's exact sequencing. Even in that incomplete state, though, American Gangster already sounded like a Jay-Z fan's dream come true. Make no mistake — despite the emotional reference points provided by the album's namesake film, which played overhead on a flat-screen TV throughout the listening session, this music is all about Jay and the things that make him a great artist. The beats are dominated by warm, powerful soul samples, even more so than on Jay's 2001 classic The Blueprint; the lyrics outlining a street hustler's mentality are by turns as clever, as incisive, as gritty, as moving as any in his catalogue. (The album is in part a reaction to the lyrical vapidity of hits like Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot," he said: "When the guy says 'I could make a mil' saying nothing on the track,' you know you've reached a bad place.") After the jump, check out a track-by-track preview of the highlights so far...

...READ THE AUTHOR'S TRACK-BY-TRACK ANALYSIS HERE...