"No Hook" has some of the most complicated rhyme-patterns he's tried in years, but it's all in service of a sad picture of the conflicts of anyone who makes a living doing dangerous, immoral things: "'Stay out of trouble,' mama said as mama sighs/ Her fear her youngest son being victim of homicide/ But I gotta get you out of here, mama, or I'm die inside." (Nobody uses long breathless pauses like Jay-Z when he's at his best, as he is here, those silences can say as much as his words.) On American Gangster, he's fallen back in love with language, making slick puns and jamming his lines with internal rhymes and vivid, detailed images without letting those devices detract from the emotional punch of his mini-narratives.
And so the drug-dealer story serves an important purpose: It rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place. Jay's evident obsession with the post-Don Imus furor over nihilistic rap lyrics has fuck-all to do with his gangster narrative, for instance, but Jay's willingness to break narrative and address that obsession leads to lines like this one, where he calls out recent rap foe Al Sharpton on "Say Hello": "Tell him I'll remove the curses/ If you tell me our schools gon' be perfect/ When Jena 6 don't exist / Tell him that's when I'll stop saying 'bitch,' bitch!" The album's story gives it enough structure to feel huge and all-encompassing, but Jay floats in and out of it as fluidly as he switches between the first and second person.
So American Gangster doesn't quite work as a concept album, but it's difficult to imagine the record would be better if that concept had been fully realized and fleshed-out. On his wide-scope art-piece, Jay still can't put aside commercial success and relentless self-aggrandizement, even if those twin impulses fuck up his concept. On "Blue Magic", he even growls, "Can't you tell that I came from the dope game?" like it's a point of personal pride, immediately after he depicted an inevitable criminal downfall. Jay actually corrupts the impact of his own moralistic rise-and-fall story by ending the album with a pair of bonus tracks, "Blue Magic" and "American Gangster", that trumpet Jay's own triumph over the vast impersonal forces that landed his protagonist in prison. Throughout, Jay-Z breaks that narrative whenever he feels like it, taking care to force in all his standbys: The sneering aristocratic death-threats, the breezy uptempo party-songs, the (especially forced) for-the-ladies seduction-song. That story animates the album, but it doesn't dictate its movements. Over the course of its first 13 tracks, the album loosely outlines the criminal rise and fall we've seen in so many movies: the desperation of youth, the excited early schemes, the slow hard-fought rise, the lavish celebration of that rise, the eventual joyless inertia involved in maintaining that success, the sudden and inevitable descent into a prison-cell anonymity worse than death. Well, as a concept-album, American Gangster is kind of a wash. As a piece of media-manipulation, American Gangster is dazzling. In working to create the impression that he'd sacrificed commerce for art, Jay recast himself as an artist rather than a CEO, a canny commercial move at a time when rappers like Kanye West are outselling CEOs like 50 Cent. By attaching himself to a big-budget crime epic, Jay guaranteed himself cross-media presence and positioned himself to regain some of the grimy credibility he'd lost with 2006's Kingdom Come, the would-be comeback that found Jay rapping about brands so expensive most of his audience had no idea what he was talking about. It makes for a good story and a great marketing coup.
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