Jay-Z At The Movies

Posted by Peter Smith

In his music, Jay-Z has always quoted and referenced his favorite gangster movies, from Scarface and Carlito's Way to the 1992 banger's character drama South Central. His new album, American Gangster, was "inspired" by the new movie of the same name; it mixes Jay-Z's raps and samples from the picture to tell the story of Frank Lucas, the old-school high roller played by Denzel Washington. It's not the first time that Jay-Z has experimented with music as movies, and vice versa; as Kelefa Sanneh writes, "in the late 1990s Jay-Z did American Gangster in reverse when he used a handful of his tracks as the basis for Streets Is Watching, a mini-feature. (It’s essentially a hip-hop musical starring Jay-Z, and it proves that hearing him rap about murder is much more fun than watching him pretend to commit it.)" The new project also gives him a chance — sometimes wittily, sometimes maybe not so much — to point up some of the contradictions and ironies implicit in hip-hop attitudes regarding self-styled Super Flys like Lucas. At one point, Jay-Z likens himself to Lucas in terms of utter coolness but feels compelled to add, "Like Frank Lucas is cool, but I ain’t tryna snitch." Does this mean that he forgives Lucas for having made his money off the drug addicts of Harlem, but not for having turned state's witness? — Phil Nugent