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In American Gangster, his 10th studio album and second since 'retirement' with The Black Album, Jay-Z has drawn inspiration from Ridley Scott's new movie of the same name. It's easy to see how the production meeting might have gone:
Jay-Z: So, Ridders, what's this film about?
Ridley: Well, it's about the rise of an a black American legend from his humble early beginnings, downtrodden by the system, into a career of drugs and various underworld links, before becoming the CEO of his own empire, while a number of snipers in the same business trying to drag him down.
Jay-Z: You're serialising my previous 9 albums?!
Yes, the links between the 'American Gangster' protagonist Frank Lucas (sample quote from the film: "no black man has accomplished what the American mafia hasn't in 100 years!") and the recurring themes of 'coming from the projects', 'hustling blow' and 'achieving redemption by being amazingly talented' in Jay-Z's oeuvre are not difficult to draw, but fortunately the rapper approaches the material with an air of pretentiousness that means it doesn't defend into a "shooting and killing my way to the top"-style farce. Pretentiousness? Well, this is, after all, described as a concept album rather than a soundtrack, and Jay-Z personally, and sensationally, pulled the album from iTunes on its US release, stating that "as movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles".
It's this kind of comment that often makes a music-buyer massively excited at the quality of a SERIOUS MUSICAL ENDEAVOUR, only to be disappointed by the overblown, overcomplicated and ultimately soulless music that ensues. Fortunately Jay-Z does not get caught up in his own bombast, producing an album where the only dud seems to be Hello Brooklyn 2.0, bass as leaden as that heard standing outside a Nova in an Asda carpark on a Friday night under a nail- shreddingly irritating Lil' Wayne hook. Otherwise the album swerves between the bass-heavy sound of the future (Blue Magic), funk laden jamz (Party Life), and soul-influenced tunes that call to mind the most masterful of film soundtracks, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, with strings slicker than an oil spill in a Brylcreem factory (title track, and the incredible Fallin'). Rhymes are as tight as ever, with Hova mixing up slow rolling lines and faster spitting, with his trademark humour, and subjects drawn from the period of the film, including Ron Regan and the Iran-Contra affair.
As the figure in popular culture that has probably used the term to refer to himself most, Jay-Z is the perfect candidate for this exploration of the history of the word 'gangster', but, like a documentary on BBC 3, he doesn't forget to make it entertaining.
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