DECODED is a riveting, beautifully-written book with deep insights and an intimate look into the man’s difficult and imperfect life.
You heard it here first. Anthropology is the study of humanity. DECODED will become known as one of the most important anthropological books of all time, because of its raw, intimate truth about the poor urban black experience from the 1970′s through late 1990′s and how that has come through in popular music.
I haven’t really listened to much of his music (yet), but I hate that Jay-Z sold crack for many years, but I respect his honesty about it and his book helps me understand the world he’s from (see the excerpt from p 218 below*).
As a white man living in beautiful Mendham, NJ it’s easy for me to judge him, but it’s better to have been able to gain some understanding about him.
I can’t possibly do the book justice, but here are a few excerpts from DECODED:
(On the word nigga, which some say is a matter of acknowledging the deep and painful history of the word): “To me, it’s just a word, a word whose power is owned by the user and his or her intention. People give words power, so banning a word is futile, really. “Nigga” becomes “porch monkey” becomes “coon” and so on if that’s what’s in a person’s heart. The key is to change the person. And we change people through conversation, not censorship.” ~Epilogue
(On Biggie Smalls’ line “Look at our parents, even they fukn scared of us”): “With that line, Big captured the whole transformation (of the influence of young men as crack cocaine hustlers) in a few words. Authority was turned upside down. Guys my age, few up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying utility bills with money from hustling … teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers. Broad-daylight shootouts had our grandmothers afraid to leave the house, and had neighbors who’d known us since we were toddlers forming Neighborhood Watches against us too.” p 13
I can’t find the passage, but to me a highlight of the book is when Shawn talks about now recognizing the deep courage it took for a young person to walk past all the brewing trouble and (seemingly) easy money of the streets to make minimum wage at McDonald’s. This is another unsung facet of life in poor neighborhoods – maybe worth exploring in future albums. (Found it on p 75: “It took me a long time to realize how much courage it took to work at McDonald’s, to walk through the streets past rows of hustlers wearing that orange uniform. But at the time, it seemed like an act of surrender to a world that hated us.” Think about those last words “to a world that hated us” and how it must feel to live your entire life with everyone you know truly believing that and having it reinforced by every one of your experiences.)
p 94 “It’s easy to take shots at performers wen they seem to self-destruct. But there’s another way to look at it. When you reach that top level, there’s suddenly so much to deal with on all fronts – you have old friends and distant family who are suddenly close, people who feel like they should be getting rich from your success. You have a target on your back from other people … who feels like your success should be theirs. You have to deal with lawyers and accountants, and you have to be able to trust these people you’re just meeting with everything you have. There’s just more of everything. Women, money, “friends,” piles of whatever your vice is. There’s enough of whatever you love to kill you. That kind of change can destabilize even the most grounded personality. And that’s when you lose yourself…”
p 154 “America, as I understood the concept, ated my black ass.”
p 154 “Poor people in general have a twisted relationship with the government, We’re aware of the government from the time we’re born. We live in government-funded housing and work government jobs. We have family and friends spending time in the ultimate public housing, prison. We grow up knowing people who pay for everything with little plastic cards – Medicare cards for checkups, EBT cards for food. We know what AFDC and WIC stand for and we stand for hours waiting for bricks of government cheese. The first and fifteenth of each month are times of peak economic activity. We get to know all kinds of government agencies not because of civics class, but because they actually visit our houses and sit up on our couches asking questions. From the time we’re small children we go to public schools that tell us all we need to know about what the government thinks of us. Then there are the cops…”
p 155 “Housing projects are a great metaphor for the government’s relationship with poor folks: these huge islands built mostly in the middle of nowhere, designed to warehouse lives. People are still people, though, so we turned the projects into real communities, poor or not (Notice how starkly this last sentence contrasts with the entry 5 paragraphs above that begins “On Biggie Smalls’ line…”). We played in fire hydrants and had cookouts and partied, music bouncing off concrete walls. But even when we could shake off the full weight of those imposing buildings and try to just live, the truth of our lives and struggle was still invisible to the larger country.
p 155 “Politicians – at the highest levels – would try to silence and kill our culture if they could hustle some votes out of it. Even black leaders who were supposed to be representing you would turn on you…”
* p 218 “The worst thing about being poor in America isn’t the deprivation … The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden … The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.”
p 220 “The shame and stigma of poverty means that we turn away from it, even those of us living through it, but turning away doesn’t make it disappear.”
p 220 “To some degree charity is a racket in a capitalist system, a way of making our obligations to one another optional, and of keeping poor people feeling a sense of indebtedness to the rich, even if the rich spend every other day exploiting those same people.”
p 221 (on the seventh degree of giving in Judaism) “The seventh degree is giving anonymously, so you don’t know who you’re giving to, and the person on the receiving end doesn’t know who gave. The value of that is that the person receiving doesn’t have to feel some kind of obligation to the giver and the person giving isn’t doing it with an ulterior motive. It’s a way of putting the giver and receiver on the same level.”
p 239 “…How can he do both unless he’s some kind of hypocrite? But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas.”
DECODED – read it, twice.