Decoded

My lovely and talented sister gave me Decoded as a present. In this aesthetically beautiful book, Jay-Z tells his story, unpacks his rhymes (much more impressive than I expected), and makes a case for the integrity of hip-hop.

Some people call heroic figures who take action activists. Others call them entrepreneurs. Jay-Z calls him the modern day hustla.

"My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It's allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. Stories have ups and downs and moments of development followed by moments of climax; the storyteller has to keep it all together, which is an incredibly skill. But poetry is all climax, every word and line pops with the same energy as the whole; even the spaces between the words can feel charged with potential energy. It fits my style to rhyme with high stakes riding on every word and to fill every pause with pressure and possibility. And maybe I just have ADD, but I also like my rhymes to stay loose enough to follow whatever ideas hijack my train of thought, just like I like my mind to stay loose enough to absorb everything around me.

-- p. 191, emphasis mine