It's as much a guidebook as it is an autobiography. It's certainly unconventional: Decoded weaves between personal remembrances and anecdotes while also unpacking more than 30 classic and unreleased Jay-Z cuts, dissecting each line as though it were Shakespeare. You don't see 50 Cent pulling apart "In Da Club," do you?
It speaks to the extremely high caliber of Jay-Z's work, not to mention the Brooklyn-born MC's laser-like attention to detail.
Over and over again, throughout this stylish, 317-page tome, the product of Marcy Projects just might surprise you. (At first glance, Decoded looks like a mash-up between splashy coffee-table book and earnest biography.)
Famously reticent in interviews (a point he underlines more than once here), Decoded doesn't necessarily function as an end-of-career tell-all or even a juicy peek behind the curtain; in fact, he barely sketches out his biography at all.
A working knowledge of the man born Shawn Carter's rise from the grim, drug-infested projects to the boardrooms of corporate America helps make Decoded more rewarding.
Instead, Jay-Z simply dives in, assuming the reader's passing familiarity with who he is and what he's accomplished.
There's no linear narrative progression from boyhood to the boardroom; Decoded is instead structured thematically, with Jay-Z tackling politics or religion or his ongoing struggles to balance life and work.
Jay-Z also does a great job of framing hip-hop's ascent to a dominant cultural force, tracing the slow, steady rise of rappers as social lightning rods, whether it's the Sugarhill Gang or Public Enemy. You get a sense of the man, but he stops short of revealing everything; it's just enough to fill in some of the details about his work -- as well as setting the record straight, in a few instances.
Contrary to what hip-hop artists are often portrayed as, Jay-Z is thoughtful, well read and fascinated by human behavior. He's never not exploring the world around him, taking stock of those he encounters and filtering his experiences through his work.
For rap aficionados, however, the most invaluable part of Decoded undoubtedly will be the line-by-line commentary Jay-Z offers for a selection of songs that, while highlighting a few wildly popular cuts ("Big Pimpin'" and "99 Problems," for example), largely focuses on his back catalog and even a few unreleased tracks.
He picks apart each song, pointing to turns of phrase or opaque slang, and even patting himself on the back when pulling off a particularly erudite piece of linguistic showmanship.
"As an MC I still loved rhyming for the sake of rhyming, purely for the aesthetics of the rhyme itself," Jay-Z writes about his early embrace of hip-hop, "the challenge of moving around couplets and triplets, stacking double entendres, speed rapping. If it hadn't been for hustling, I would've been working on being the best MC, technically, to ever touch a mic."
Above all, this close reading of songs, that might otherwise be written off by the cognoscenti as marginal, underscores how vital and how gripping rap can be, when performed with aims beyond pleasing the club-goers.
For his part, Jay-Z acknowledges many of the unlikely situations he's found himself in over the course of his career, not least of which was running Island Def Jam for a spell as chairman.
He freely admits that his trajectory -- from drug dealer to global superstar -- is unique; he also speaks repeatedly about the need for hip-hop to be authentic, to give some straightforward accounting of the lives lived outside the margins and between the cracks.
Which is what Decoded, above all else, finally feels like: an honest, unassuming sojourn through the mind of one of music's most engaging talents, a man who has made it his mission to break down barriers and bring his experiences to the world.
First Published December 10, 2010, 12:36 a.m.