Considering: JAY-Z's "The Blueprint" twenty years later

​JAY-Z is as tied to New York City as the signature baseball team. In “Empire State of Mind” he says, “I can make a Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can” and the NY embossed over hard fabric is as much a signifier of Shawn Carter as the blue tones shading The Blueprint’s album art. JAY-Z is also as tied to New York City as the hometown heroes in Madison Square Garden, again JAY-Z raps: “sitting courtside Knicks & Nets give me high-fives.” This is, after all, where he’s from.
It is utter coincidence that the best album from New York’s best rapper was released on New York’s worst day. The worldwide reputation of the city remains tied to JAY-Z’s career lyrically, narratively, and in the instance of the September 11, 2001 release of The Blueprint, also in tragedy. Mournfully JAY-Z sings, “ain’t no love, in the heart of the city / I said where’s the love? / ain’t no love, in the heart of town”, but in the shaken spirit of New Yorkers in the days, weeks, and months that followed the collapse of The World Trade Center, much of that love was to be found among New Yorkers.
In The Blueprint JAY-Z is doing what JAY-Z does best: talking story about the grimy life of street hustlers and gangsters. In a tender performance from The Concert For New York City, a benefit concert for first responders just over a month after the September 11th terrorist attacks “Ain’t No Love (In the Heart of the City)” morphs into a celebration of finding each other in previously unimaginable hatred and violence. Coincidently, the concert recording (which also featured an acoustic performance of “IZZO (HOVA)” ala the MTV Unplugged session) was my gateway to JAY-Z, and really, all hip hop. Strange as it may seem, I can’t help but merge these seemingly unrelated events: the release of JAY-Z’s sixth studio album and September 11th both as remember exactly where you were when, and yet, I’m in my grandmother’s van listening to a CD with a guy called JAY-Z orating “thanks for comin’ out tonight / you coulda been anywhere in the world, but you’re here with me / I appreciate that”. Having not grown up with hip-hop I’d never heard anything like that before, just a simple ad lib that, on the album is a simple break from the evisceration of “Takeover” and acts as a bridge into the more pop R&B “Girls, Girls, Girls”.
But in the context of that benefit concert, it is a great moment of hospitality from the genre’s most gifted and, in this instance, generous emcee.
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The Blueprint opens like any good epic with a recap. “The Ruler’s Back” fills in the blanks since 2000’s posse album The Dynasty: Roc La Familia and JAY-Z’s last proper solo album Vol. 3 … Life and Times of S. Carter (1999). He sounds familiar, ad libbing “I wanna thank everybody out there for they purchase / we surely appreciate it” which JAY-Z does similarly on Vol. 3, and like a good host, gives a preview: “what you about to witness is my thoughts (just my thoughts, man) / right or wrong / just what I was feelin’ at the time / you ever felt like this, vibe with me.” JAY-Z also comes out sounding invigorated: “Gather ‘round, hustlers, that’s if you still livin’.” And then, as promised, the ruler shows his face.
This first face is a mean one. We bounce into a Kanye West-produced Doors sampling battle rap to put Nas, and everybody else barely worth half a bar, to bed for good. Instead of thinking about JAY-Z from a historical perspective, or trying to read The Blueprint narratively, you simply could read the lyrics to every single bar in “Takeover” to understand why this was the most important album of 2001 and while it remains one of the genre’s most important albums 20 years later. JAY-Z is a mean mother fucker, but he’s also an extremely skillful and artful mother fucker.

​“Takeover” somehow isn’t even the third best Kanye joint JAY-Z raps on, but “IZZO (HOVA)” is easily tied for best. (Even today) I wouldn’t want to pigeon hole the guy, but Kanye West is such a good producer and its so obvious in the way he twists JAY-Z’s hustler street smart businessman lyrics around a radio-friendly beat. The sample is warm, captures the grandiosity of autobiographical moments that would fit in an ensemble number in a musical: “Hov is back, life stories told through rap / n****s acting like I sold you crack / like I told you sell drugs, no, Hov did that / so hopefully you won’t have to go through that.” Blueprint’s worldbuilding somehow both projects JAY-Z into the future as a money-minded mogul and sets the scenes of his Reasonable Doubt-era come up. In anybody else’s hands it would smack of inauthenticity, but deftly, JAY-Z sells “I was raised in the projects, roaches and rats / smokers out back selling’ they mama’s sofa” as a real scene, a necessary scene so we can cheer along with him: “what else can I say about dude? I gets busy.”
If “IZZO” dips its toe in pop rap territory, the sometimes cringey “Girls, Girls, Girls” is an absolute pop R&B megahit. Some of the lyrics haven’t aged as well as others, but you gotta belly laugh when JAY-Z raps in French: “ma cherie amour, tu es belle / merci, you’re fine as fuck, but you giving me hell.” You gotta wonder how often this one gets played in the Carter/Knowles household, but as a hot song of the summer contenders, “Girls, Girls, Girls” transcends its deeply flawed concept. Plus, friggin’ Q-Tip pops up for the chorus. What more can you ask for?

​“U Don’t Know” gets The Blueprint back into battle rap territory and on a personal note, opens up my all time favorite genre of JAY-Z lyric: him doing math. Literally every line on the skittering big precision chipmunk soul beat Just Blaze puts together is memorable, but as a thesis statement JAY-Z’s last verse really puts one era of the hungry hustler to bed before Black Album’s maximalist braggadocio (what JAY-Z will go on to mythology in Blueprint 3 with: “used to rock a throwback, ballin’ on the corner / now I rock a tailored suit lookin’ like an owner.”). He raps with the ferocity:
                        I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in Hell
                        I am a hustler baby, I’ll sell water to a whale
                        I was born to get cake, move on and switch states
                        Cop the coupe with the roof gone and switch places
                        Was born to dictate, never follow orders, dick face
                        Get your shit straight, fucker, this is Big JAY-Z.
The demand is simple and even easier to follow. “Hola’ Hovito” dials back the power in favor for what can be best described as Timbland’s best effort at a Dr. Dre g-funk SoCal production. It’s a better sonic experiment than the eastern tones of “Jigga that N***a” (which is better captured in Blueprint 2’s “The Bounce” in 2002) but both provide bridges between the better songs in the mix.

And as far as better songs go, none soar as high as the untouchable “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” which returns to the same well of radio ready mega rap hits The Blueprint opens with. Another autobiographical track, “Heart of the City” closes the gap with “The Rule’s Back,” once again setting the scene. “now every day I wake up / somebody’s got a problem with Hov? / What’s up? Y’all n****s all fed up ‘cause I got a little cheddar / and my record’s movin’ out the store?” The whole song goes in with memorable lines, and opens up the album for the next few more mellow, more autobiographical tracks.
“Never Change,” for example, brings back the chipmunk soul and sees a reflective JAY-Z-Z rapping about how he’s “still fuckin’ with crime, ‘cause crime pays” and dispensing wisdom: “we all fish, better teach your folk / give him money to eat, the next week he’s broke / ‘cause when you sleep, he’s reachin’ for your throat.” Or, “Song Cry” gives listeners a preview of the self-critical 4:44 with a downright majestic soliloquy about infidelity: “It was the cheese, helped them bitches get amnesia quick / I used to cut up they buddies, now they sayin’ they love me.” Its pretty wild to jump from “U Don’t Know” to the vulnerability on display here: “shit, I’ve got to live with the fact I did you wrong forever.” It’s a poem, man.
“All I Need” is the lesser of the Carter-family hits that make use of Tupac’s “Me and My Girlfriend” and begins the falling action of The Blueprint, which doesn’t end as strong as it does jump out of the gates. “Renegade” rolls out Eminem, and if not for the home and home co-headlining tour JAY-Z and Em did in Detroit and New York in 2010, I’d write off entirely. Eminem kind of sucks, but you might like this song. Structurally its interesting to see these two trade verses off twice; it’s a long song, and its weird for JAY-Z to give Eminem the last word, but at least Em is set up to call himself “a regular modern-day Shakespeare” setting up corny English teachers (yours, truly) to bring rap music in the classroom forever.
Is “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)” technically a title track? It feels like the credits roll on a movie, and The Blueprint plays through highs and lows scene-to-scene like a feature film, so it’s a nice moment of closure for JAY-Z-Z’s clam recounting of the family members off stage supporting him in the wings. We hear about Ti-Ti, who JAY-Z would literally kiss on the forehead, we hear about the origins of the rapper: “Clark sought me out, Dame believed … Reasonable Dout classic, shoulda went triple” but ultimately fixates on, and returns to Gloria Carter, the titular Momma.
Of course, the movies ends. JAY-Z raps: “Police pursued me, chased, cuffed, subdued me / talked to me rudely ‘cause I’m young, rich, and I’m black and living a / movie.”
 
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What’s funny about The Blueprint is how hard it sounds like JAY-Z is trying to convince listeners, record labels, and himself, how classic the album is, how established he is as an artist and a rapper. This is in tension with lyrics boasting about transcending the streets and rap music. In “Heart of the City,” for example, JAY-Z challenges: “Look, scrapper, I got nephews to look after / I’m not lookin’ at you dudes, I’m lookin’ past ya / I thought I told you characters I’m not a rapper / can I live? / I told you ’96 I came to take this shit and I did / handle my biz.” The both-and really makes JAY-Z a vital voice in his own movie: calling back “Can I Live?” from Reasonable Doubt in order to argue he’s succeeded his way out of the game, in the middle of what is obviously the biggest hit single from his current album? Hilarious.
JAY-Z of course goes on to make an ill received sequel to Blueprint before utterly exploding every possible metric for hip-hop success with The Black Album and then lists into his late-career period with some occasionally exciting, often uninspired albums. Frozen in time, as September 2001 already is, The Blueprint really gives a picture of a JAY-Z on what we know to be an early ascent, seemingly about to max out. We’re in year 25 of JAY-Z’s career, and he hasn’t really released a piece of shit album yet, and yet, among those 13 releases, there are still obvious highlights. That’s pretty good sign for a guy who’s “music bangin’ like vatos locos,” who “got rap in a chokehold” (You know I had to sneak some JAY-Z rapping in Spanish on y’all).
One last interesting thing to note in the years of JAY-Z’s late-late career (including, sadly, two washed-ass verses on the two least interesting prestige rap records of 2021, Kanye’s Donda and Drake’s Certified Lover Boy) is how gracefully The Blueprint has, unlike a lot of JAY-Z’s current works, aged. The hottest song on the album is built on a sample from The Doors, who were well-established as dad-rock mid to bottom shelf music in the early aughts. “Five to One” is classic rock canon. In 2021, JAY-Z was admitted into the rock and roll half of fame is now his own piece of classic rock canon. Do we call JAY-Z dad rap the same way we call Wilco dad rock? Maybe, but I certainly won’t be as foul-mouthed around my little man.
A reflection on The Blueprint could really be short work: the best of JAY-Z’s large bag of tricks come out in full force, including flows, rhyme and lyric structures, his team of extremely gifted producers. You’ve got like five of JAY-Z’s top ten best on this album. JAY-Z’s own daughter is named after this album, so if we were to be skeptical of The Blueprint’s 20 year legacy we might look no further than Shawn Carter’s nine year old daughter.
But maybe the easiest way to ponder The Blueprint’s place in the history books would be to listen to literally any of album’s 13 tracks and decide if we’ve heard anything quite as good sense?
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I’ll save you the trouble: we have not.