He was only going to make one album. So goes the story of Reasonable Doubt, anyway, a tale Jay Z has regaled us with at every opportunity since its release on a new and unproven independent label called Roc-A-Fella Records. It was the album he made before the world was listening, with only a close crew of friends and associates at the late age of 26. Every contributor was paid in bags of cash, piles so mountainous nobody involved could be mistaken how they were acquired. It was the valedictory statement of a drug kingpin and the commencement of a brand, a lifetime’s worth of private thoughts discharged before the true business of empire-building could begin. Grand opening; grand closing.
Shawn Carter has always been fiercely protective of his first full-length, to the degree that it sometimes feels like it belongs more to him than to us. He keeps yanking it from streaming services, as if the album is a troubled prep-school kid. He’s thrown it a series of lavish birthday parties, celebrating its 10th anniversary with a full-concert performance in 2006 and commissioning a documentary to air only on his TIDAL streaming service for its 20th. He has curated its legacy so assiduously that Reasonable Doubt seems like the one part of his story about which he remains insecure, the piece of his legacy that might blink out if he didn’t take care of it.
Perhaps he’s never forgotten its relatively inauspicious release. “Ain’t No Nigga” was a hit, for sure, and the album was certified Gold on its release; solid, but hardly world-conquering in the dynastic era CD sales. Critics were impressed, but not overly so: Mainstream and non-hip-hop publications noted it was clever at times but mostly a rehash of Scarface and gangster-movie tropes. The Source gave it 4 out of 5 mics—approving, not rapturous. The smaller but more influential world of hardcore rap intelligentsia paid attention to him, but in the shadow of Biggie and Pac, Jay felt like a lesser myth. He announced the album with a statement that he was retiring and henceforth “would only be about the business.” In some alternate universe, that might’ve been it.
In Jay’s mind at least, the album certainly marked the end of an era. At this point, by his own cold-eyed accounting on the song “Politics As Usual,” he had been selling drugs for “10 years.” Along a parallel track, he had been flirting furtively with being a rapper. He linked up with Big Jaz (later Jaz-O), doing a stint as the older man's baby-faced sidekick and kicking the triplet-time “figgity-figgity”-style flows that were sweeping New York at the time. He toured, briefly, with Big Daddy Kane, and spit some freestyles for New York hip-hop radio. He was an impressive local kid, but no one’s idea of a worldwide star.
In that murky time between his puppyish Jaz-O beginnings and his sober and assured reappearance on Reasonable Doubt, he figured some things out. First, nobody wanted to hear Jay Z excited. Composed, assured, jaded, deeply unimpressed—these were emotions he could radiate without even trying, and they were truer to his nature. Gone were the endearing attempts at dancing alongside Jaz, looking like a kid at his own bar mitzvah being coaxed onto the floor. His years selling drugs had presumably hardened him, and by the time he opened his mouth on Reasonable Doubt’s opening track, “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” he had mastered an unshakable godfather pose. It is hard to convincingly telegraph “above it all” from the bottom of the food chain, but Shawn Carter had a natural haughtiness that couldn’t be faked. “You ain’t havin’ it? Good, me either/Let’s get together and make this whole world believe us,” he barked.
He also figured out how to best wield his clear, surprisingly boyish voice. The syllable chopping disappeared and his words became musical and mellifluous. Even though his voice never rose above a conversational monotone, his words sailed high and glittering over the music, which sampled butter-soft soul from previous decades, blurred memories of more innocent times. These were the lyrics he’s been painstakingly stacking together in his head for years (the “no pen, no pad” detail is another famous and well-rehearsed bit of Jay mythos), and he rolled them out, one pearly string of words after another, like he was exhaling a breath he’d been holding forever.
Lines like “By the ounce, dough accumulate like snow” were their own kind of song, and he treated each syllable with a reverent love undetectable elsewhere in his work. On “Can I Live,” he matches the “Fs” and “Ls” in the phrase “illin’ for revenues, Rayful Edmond-like” to create an irregular little mountain-peak rhythm that echoes the stuttering “expectation for dips, we stack chips” line from earlier in the same verse. He was thinking on several levels at once—how phonetics color meaning, how multiple meanings can suggest all the stories that aren’t being told. He wanted us to feel the discomfited hum of his unquiet mind, even if we couldn’t immediately follow every stray thread. What Biggie and Pac did for self-mythologizing and hip-hop, Jay undoubtedly did for the art of close reading.
The narrative that emerges from a close reading of Reasonable Doubt remains startlingly grim; seen up close, it is a masterpiece of dissociation, a graveyard of dead emotions. From the outset, Jay Z projected surface glamor: He was the first rapper to book a flight out to St. Thomas and hop on a yacht just to film a video. He was the guy who made the “Big Pimpin’” video, putting up a million dollars for the budget. But the message behind all of this flash was always clear: It was all too late for him, and the money was just cold comfort.
This is never clearer than on “D’Evils,” maybe the bleakest, saddest song ever written about the well-worn theme of the psychic toll of drug dealing. “Shit is wicked on these mean streets” could be a boast, the prelude to some exuberant Eazy-E-style tall tales, but the next line echoes in pure psychological space: “None of my friends speak, we all trying to win.” The song’s most lurid moment of violence, and maybe the most brutal scene in all the Jay discography, occurs off-camera, so to speak, only by implication: To locate a rival, Jay kidnaps the mother of his child and stuffs bills into her mouth, force-feeding her crumpled, filthy money while she weeps as he demands information. It is a gruesome scene, but Jay the writer is uninterested in the visual; he’s drawn to the contusion it leaves on her psyche and his: “Don’t cry, it is to be/In time, I take away your miseries and make it mine,” he tells her flatly. It is a chilling promise to both end her life and carry the act with him until the end of his own.
Much later in his career, further removed from the shock of his time dealing drugs, Jay would root around in the messier, more visceral stuff of his early traumas. On “This Can’t Be Life,” he opened his heart to a former girlfriend who miscarried. On “Still Got Love For You,” from Beanie Sigel’s 2001 album The Reason, he raged at his absent father, even allowing his imperial voice to crack slightly: “I’m a mess, Dad/Still I love you no less, Dad/Hope you didn’t think success would make me less mad.” But at age 26, too old to be a burgeoning rap star and far too young to be as tired as he often appeared onstage, he was still in the blast radius of his former life, and all the wounds it left on him were still open. The wide-brimmed hat concealing his eyes, the white suit and fancy cigar of the album’s cover—they were expensive gauze pads, covering a ravaged body. On “Politics As Usual,” perhaps the silkiest track on the record, he is “Cursing the very god that brought this grief to be.”
This album’s legacy is both magnificent and lonely, an immaculate crystal chandelier gathering dust in an abandoned mansion. Every line gleams, begging you to memorize it but forbidding you from loving it. Its impact was subterranean, subliminal—Kendrick Lamar picked up on the notion of “D’evils of Lucy” as recently as 2015, with To Pimp a Butterfly. Other rappers picked up on his chilly, bored pose, but his rapping was really too byzantine to convincingly imitate. It wasn’t until he slowed down his flow, breaking off glittering bits of mind that people could hold onto, that his influence penetrated and spread. Decades later, everyone flows like Jay Z, but not the Jay Z of Reasonable Doubt. That guy is still alone with his thoughts, learning to live with regrets.
Maybe this is why Shawn Carter the man seems to have such a wistful fondness for the album and the time it represented. It feels doomed in its melancholy that it will be misunderstood. “I hope you fools choose to listen, I drop jewels, bust it,” he rhymed on “Feelin’ It,” and then sneered, “Y’all don’t feel me,” a moment later. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in rhyme, the sound of a guy baring his heart and freezing it in carbonite in the same breath. “Sometimes I hear myself moaning,” he adds later, after he’s let his guard down slightly to take a small hit of weed. It’s a startling moment of depersonalization, the sound of pain whistling like wind through the cracks in a fractured psyche.
One of the only other times Jay admits to smoking weed on record came years later, on The Black Album, a lifetime’s worth of accomplishments later. “I try to smoke weed to give me the fix I need/For what the game did to my pulse with no results,” he rapped ruefully on “Allure.” The Black Album ended his most coherent, compelling, and memorable era; the hustler makes it all the way to the beloved corporate American icon and bows out on top. He had sold out Madison Square Garden, and the entire music industry knelt at his feet. Everyone felt him. But the only place he’s ever truly wanted to get back to was here.
