It doesn’t have the consistent string of hits that its predecessor had, but “99 Problems”, “Dirt Off Your Shoulders”, and “Change Clothes” will stand as three of Jay’s most remembered and revered songs, while “Lucifer” is easily my favorite song in his catalog and what I believe to be Kanye’s best production before he started getting on the other side of the mic. The Blueprint felt like the moment Jay transitioned from a talented rapper who used to be a drug dealer into a legitimately marketable musician and The Black Album was subsequently the moment he made the jump from musician to aspiring mogul. The Blueprint is chock full of singles, but it’s a real scattershot with songs like “Takeover”, which is a stomping battle cry to all of New York, right next to something playful and radio friendly like “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”. The Black Album has had more staying power for me personally than even The Blueprint, and I think a lot of that has to do with the production. Pat Levy (PL): I’m definitively declaring The Black Album my favorite Jay Z album.
It’s also an encapsulation of Black as a whole – big, bold, and lucid. “Lucifer”, with its pithy conceits (“I’m from the murder capital where they murder for capital”) and trampoline Kanye West beat, has always been my favorite song on the album, but there’s no denying that “99 Problems” is the single most iconic track in Jay’s catalog. Black was my personal introduction to Jay, and I think it’s the more accessible album for all Jay neophytes/non-rap fans – as it turned out, the then-obscure producer Danger Mouse would ignite the early-‘00s “mash-up” craze by mixing Black with The Beatles’ White Album, while nu-metal titans Linkin Park followed suit later in 2004, blending their Meteora with Black standouts for the EP Collision Course. But though they were released just two years apart, the two have always struck me as fairly different.
I realize this isn’t an unpopular stance. The other days (though never Saturday, because The Blueprint is definitely a Saturday-afternoon album) I say The Black Album. Mike Madden (MM): Most days, I consider 2001’s The Blueprint my favorite Jay album.
The three writers digress on the LP’s status as a definitively New York record, the producers that helped make it so state-of-the-art, and how Jay’s legacy might be different if his final answer to “What More Can I Say?” had been “nothing.” For this edition of Dusting ‘Em Off, Mike Madden, Pat Levy, and Brian Josephs discuss The Black Album, Jay Z’s eighth solo LP, which turns 10 years old this week.
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