Happy 50th birthday to Jay-Z.
Where to begin when trying to qualify a near lifetime of listening to one artist?
Jay-Z has been my favorite hip-hop artist since I was teenager, and his music has been ubiquitous in my life since childhood. He rose to prominence right around the time I started listening to the radio and watching MTV, and it’s hard to imagine a time in life that does not have a Jay-Z song to match.
Image via Pinterest.
For a new episode in our podcast series with Zero Point Fiction, I recalled glimpses of my life through the lens of Jay-Z’s songs and verses. This episode was personal—I felt it necessary to use a close-to-home vantage point in order to arrive at some thesis of how art plays in our lives. What I found most fascinating when preparing for this episode was the variability in both myself and Jay-Z. The person, the self, is constantly in flux.
As Malcolm X wrote: “Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.”
But there is a glue that holds a person together throughout the stages of life, threading the whole self. Noticing the changes in myself and Jay-Z helped explain why I was and still am able to listen to his music throughout life, and how different aspects of his material appealed to me at different stages in my own development.
You can listen to the episode on iTunes, Spotify, or stream it online. Be sure to explore Zero Point Fiction’s other episodes—it’s a great podcast with varied material and interviews.
To accompany the podcast and for Jay-Z’s 50th, I created a playlist of 50 songs. The selections are songs and verses that loomed large for me at one point or another. Luckily, Jay-Z’s catalogue recently arrived on Spotify, so I was able to make this playlist on both Spotify and TIDAL.
Stream the playlist on Spotify or TIDAL. Both are embedded below.
A note: there is a slight variation between the TIDAL and Spotify versions due to the availability of certain songs. The Spotify version is especially lacking “Shiny Suit Theory” and “spiritual”—I recommend them both. A further song available on neither platform is “Glory.”
I was tempted to fill this post with some of my favorite Jay-Z lines, but I’ll let the listener discover their own—ones that resonate with them and their own story. Enjoy, and happy birthday, Jay-Z.
- JG
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