Spotlight Special: Jay Z – Reasonable Doubt

Perhaps the purest distillation of Jay Z’s musical manifesto...

Critical consensus now holds that Jay Z’s debut album is a bona fide classic, but it’s worth noting that when ‘Reasonable Doubt’ first surfaced in the summer of 1996 it was met with a markedly more mixed reception.

The LP dropped just as hip-hop was beginning to fracture into two distinct ideological camps. A spirited underground scene – which would later be defined by artists such as MF Doom, Dilated Peoples and Sir Menelik and storied independent labels like Rawkus, Fondle ‘Em and Stones Throw – was set against a glitzy, chart-primed brand of mainstream rap obsessed with designer labels and luxury living, spearheaded by Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy Entertainment label, rappers like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown and, of course, Jay Z himself.

Against this backdrop of a seemingly-unbridgeable chasm between hip-hop’s rival backpack and shiny suit factions (which came swiftly on the heels of the ruinous east coast-west coast war), Jay Z’s champagne-swigging swagger firmly split the rap cognoscenti almost immediately: many praised Jigga’s vivid rapping-as-hustling ambitions and often-heartfelt hood reportage, which bristled with the long lineage of ‘playa’ rap pioneered by LA legend Ice-T and Oakland’s Too $hort. On the flipside, however, backpackers baulked at the rampant materialism and seemingly-endless self-glorification on display, which they felt ran counter to hip-hop’s early ethos.

– – –

The LP dropped just as hip-hop was beginning to fracture into two distinct ideological camps…

– – –

After a fairly inauspicious early career – initial moves with fellow Brooklynite Jaz-O at the start of the ‘90s were followed by a handful of guest verses for the likes of Big Daddy Kane and Big L in which he was roundly outclassed – Jay Z had begun to grow in confidence, not least on 1994’s fine ‘In My Lifetime’ 12”. Indeed, in the run-up to the release of ‘Reasonable Doubt’, he’d rather arrogantly teased that it would be his one and only album, promising to quit rapping once it dropped. Of course, no one took him seriously.

And so, beneath all the Moet, Cristal and Lexus endorsements on the surface, the LP bubbled with strong ideas which would become familiar hip-hop tropes well into the new millennium, setting Shawn Carter firmly on the road to rap superstardom.

On ‘Cashmere Thoughts’, he declared himself “the ghetto’s Errol Flynn, hot like heroin”, while the back-and-forth master/apprentice structure of ‘Coming Of Age’ still sounds great today. And with the genre beginning to make major mainstream moves – the Fugees’ ‘The Score’ was building serious momentum by this point – the Mary J. Blige-featuring ‘Can’t Knock The Hustle’ was a perfectly-pitched R&B/rap crossover.

– – –

– – –

Meanwhile, Jigga’s relaxed, conversational rhyme style stood in sharp contrast to the rather convoluted rapid-fire tongue-twisting delivery he’d employed back in 1990, working best on the LP’s melancholic moments such as ‘Politics As Usual’: “Sucking me in like a vacuum, I remember/Telling my family: “I’ll be back soon” – that was December/’85 and Jay-Z rise, 10 years later/Got me wise still can’t break my underworld ties/I wear black a lot…”

Musically, Jay Z’s later LPs often stumbled clumsily into crass commercialism, but here he finely matched his aspirational rhymes with equally luxurious sonics (the ridiculously smooth ‘Cashmere Thoughts’ beat is an inspired reworking of Hamilton Bohannon’s ‘Save Their Souls’). At the same time, Jigga – as if conscious of hip-hop’s looming underground/mainstream schism – drafted in Gang Starr beatmaker and New York underground figurehead DJ Premier and Ski Beatz, once of the semi-obscure Bizzie Boyz, to craft the street level bangers.

All that said, the album’s not without its flaws. Lead single Ain’t No Nigga’, the inexplicably popular collaboration with Foxy Brown, is still fucking awful: badly produced, lazily executed, a career nadir for the pair of them. Elsewhere, ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’ – the renowned pair-up with Notorious BIG – would not be the last time Jigga was lyrically upstaged by one of his guests (see also: Eminem’s scene-stealing spot on 2001’s ‘Renegade’.)

– – –

A delicate mix of street philosophy, drug politics and rapping-as-a-survival-tactic…

– – –

Thematically, meanwhile, Hov’ pilfers way too many ideas from Raekwon’s stellar ‘Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…’ (1995), with his Mafioso lifestyle designs and Tony Montana fantasies occasionally coming over as second-hand knockoffs compared to the Wu-Tang man’s rich, cinematic approach. (And let’s not forget, Nas’s sophomore LP ‘It Was Written’ floundered by taking a similar direction; thankfully, De La Soul would resurface later in the summer to quite magnificently skewer rap’s whole La Cosa Nostra fixation on the all-time classic ‘Stakes Is High’.)

Still, for all its faults, ‘Reasonable Doubt’ remains a mightily impressive work twenty years on, and perhaps the purest distillation of Jay Z’s musical manifesto: it’s a delicate mix of street philosophy, drug politics and rapping-as-a-survival-tactic that both celebrates and critiques American capitalism. It’s the compelling sound of a hungry, talented emcee – who had not yet become a byword for vulgar materialism in music – with his eyes firmly on the prize, the Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Cash Rules Everything Around Me’ recast as a ten-feet high campaign slogan looming large in the background.

It’s also a landmark album that succinctly captures a tectonic shift in rap’s politics at the time, one of a handful of records that signalled a major turning point for the genre, which saw artists – for better or for worse – begin to recalibrate their focus away from the blocks and towards the boardrooms. Can’t knock the hustle.

– – –

– – –

Words: Hugh Leask

Buy Clash Magazine

-
Join the Clash mailing list for up to the minute music, fashion and film news.