How JAY-Z’s Decoded Made Me a College Dropout…

When I attended Howard W. Blake high school, I always understood that one wrong turn and my life could’ve gone down a destructive path. 

Performing The Meeting by Jeff Stetson

 I had not understood how the subtle affects of the drug culture of Hip Hop had snuck into all of our psyche’s and created a rampant drug problem in my peers and teachers.

For some time, Hip-Hop carried a stigma of “glorifying” drugs and gang violence. It even received criticism of highlighting this violent imagery to promote other brands and businesses (liquor, fashion and the prison industrial complex). But for teenagers in Tampa, none of that mattered. The music had become a drug itself, providing that euphoria and an excuse to live out our own agendas. We were listening to the music with a desire to feel free from our teachers and other students. Free to express ourselves however we wanted.

Just as Ritalin and vyvanse were prescribed to us, so was Lil Wayne’s Me and My Drank, I Feel Like Dying and I’m Me. Those songs gave us the exact ego boost we needed to disobey our teachers. These songs were prescribed to us by the radio and television broadcasting everyday.

Lil Wayne's unofficial cover for I Feel Like Dying

The New Plug:

School was not hard for me, but by the time I’d made it to high school it’d definitely lost its interest. Teachers would try to get my attention through rap music. One teacher would pull me to the side and spark conversation about Shakespeare because she knew I  was in school for acting. But before this teacher, I had never given Shakespeare any genuine consideration. 

She’d caught my attention by comparing my story to JAY-Z. And in 2010 in Tampa, that was an insult. That meant that I was boring and swag-less. By this time JAY-Z was outdated, expired goods - we were in the era of Lil Wayne being the greatest rapper alive. Jay didn’t have that same intoxicating voice that preluded Mumble rap, or that provocative wit that pissed our teachers off. JAY-Z was something that teachers, prescribed to students when they wanted to let the students know they liked Hip-Hop.

Kanye West T.I. Jay Z Lil Wayne and random white guy at the Grammys after performing Swagga Like Us (2009)

However, studying Hip-Hop with Bronx DJ, DJ I AM, I’d known more JAY-Z than my average peer. Miserably, I understood the comparison, although it was uneasy to digest. As she began to compare him to Shakespeare, breaking down the sonnets next to his lyrics, I slowly began to see the correlation she was making. Jay wasn’t just a rapper or a pop-star like Wayne was, his lyrics were revolutionary, they were starting to read like full doctoral theses business plan on wax.

“I came in to this mo********er hundred grand strong, nine to be exact - from grinding G packs”

I started to get a new sense of euphoria from the craft looking at lyrics. Hip-Hop started to become something more than my drug; it became my purpose. But the final straw came when she said that JAY-Z was just as studious as me and I was NOT having; at all. Jay-Z was clearly smart and could kick some emotionally evocative lyrics, but come on now! He’s an avid reader? I felt like she was trying too hard to make a correlation.

This teacher told me to read Jay’s book Decoded and rethink my opinion.

It was the first time I got a side by side visual of a writer’s process. It literally changed the way I wrote raps from looking at the sentence structures to even aligning the margins on my papers differently.

What was revolutionary for me was reviewing songs I’d known and looking at them as literature. I had not known how far his emotional depth had reached. What certain lines meant for Jay at the time. It was great having context for certain choices and to get a Hip-Hop history from JAY-Z at this time was vital literature, in my opinion. He breaks down competition, style and creativity, his executive decisions all next to his lyrics.

Reviewing Jay from a literary standpoint proved that he was a scientist, or scholar. After reading his epilogue, I had realized I’d done to him what Oprah had done to him.

My disbelief came from a sense of Southern Nationalism. Wayne was the greatest and had proven it time and again. In my limited tenure in Hip-Hop at the age of 14. The book helped me develop a sense of pride in lyricism. It validated the importance that Hip-Hop lyrics had for me. For so long, I’d felt Hip-Hop was not viewed as a valuable a form of literature and was not taken seriously. It felt like what I thought was genius was not acceptable to Corporate America or in academia, and that Jay-Z had provided the evidence to exhibit our art as poetry.

Teachers certainly loved to let me rap when it was convenient to the lesson plan and contained within certain parameters; but never would they allow it to enter their curriculum to teach people the depth of soul. And yet, Shakespeare is praised for doing the most basic form of what we were creating from the top of our heads. Shakespeare is expired goods, out of social context and can’t produce the synergy to galvanize an entire community without something current and fresh to infuse it with.

Motherfuckers say that I’m foolish

I only talk about jewels do you fools

Listen to music or do you just skim through it

Decoded gave me confidence in my pen and all that I’d pulled from my subconscious. I began to view it just as worthy as the works of Cormac McCarthy and Shakespeare. I began to write plays from that same subconscious realm. I began to rebel by living in a constant state of that freestyler inside of me, because the simplicity of the “real world” was not as fun. Jay gave me the excuse to freestyle everyday, and to build your own personal portfolio while the industry attempts to strip you of your time, will and intellectual property.