What hurts more than being mocked?

 Sasha Frere-Jones' review of Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail wastes no time in pointing out the hilarity of Jay's echo to Nirvana in the first verse of the opening track:

It’s like Jay Z asked Pandora to produce the record and then left for a meeting.

It's now been over one and a half years since I wrote my senior thesis on hip-hop (which, by the way for anyone still in college, has not been read by anyone since I graduated). The subject of the paper - Demystifying the Corporate Hip Hop and Ethnic Hip Hop Binary - examined the tension between the highly commercialized rap ballads of Jay-Z's repertoire and the more real, often political, themes found in his other works.

The racial profiling scenes elicited in 99 Problems ? Genius. Murder to Excellence , perhaps the most politically charged track on Jay-Z and Kanye West's popular Watch the Throne ? I can't think of a better song equipped with addressing the corporate/political tension in hip hop. In the track, the hip-hop duo dedicate one half of the song to the upper crust of Black society and call on others to strive for what Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey, and yours truly experience in the present today (Now please domino domino/only spot a few blacks the higher I go/What's up Will/shout out to O/that ain't enough we gonna need a million more) . But they only get to this conversation after addressing black on black murder (hence the name of the song) alluding to the friendly fire through an homage to Danroy Henry, a NY college student killed by a policeman in 2012. 

All of these layers are absent in Jay-Z's latest album Magna Carta Holy Grail, which, If you've been following, was pre-released after Samsung's sponsored 1 million copies to be downloaded from a promotional app available only on Samsung phones. 

The full release of Magna Carta emerges at a time when all eyes are on the Trayvon Martin case. An opportunity one would expect Jay to take up back in the days of yore. Jay's tracks, sprinkled with Basquiat references, trips to the MoMA, and of course his daughter Blue, are seemingly void of the responsibility once apparent in Jay's earlier work. Juxtaposed against Kanye West's highly acclaimed Yeezus and the politically charged singles New Slaves and Black Skinheads  and it seems that despite their heavy collaboration just two years ago, the two kings of hip-hop are in two very different stages of their careers. 

Frere-Jones elaborates with an argument I wholly accept: 

But “Yeezus” is a compelling piece of work, and even if West hadn’t made a single beat on the album (he did) it wouldn’t detract from the unity of a cohesive and off-putting piece of work. How off-putting? Enough so that Spinpublished “Sheezus Talks,” where “seven badass female culture critics assess and, well, psychoanalyze Kanye West’s bachelor party.” That is either a testimony to West’s misogyny or his importance, or both. But Jay Z says things that sound infinitely worse on “Magna Carta,” and few even notice. What hurts more than being mocked? Being ignored, which maybe is why you make a deal with a phone company to make sure a million people hear your album whether or not they like it. (This may be what Jay Z means by the “new rules.”) “Magna Carta” feels like Jay Z grasping for the deep-rooted significance that he had for almost a decade straight, and that West has now. 

See here for Frere-Jones full write-up. 

A Thank You Experiment

In last week's New Yorker Patricia Marx (no relation, I think...) articulates the problem of remembering to remember as a lack of prospective memory. One technique Marx stumbles upon in her research is to "link the item that's threating to vaporize in your mind with another that's more rooted in your consciousness." 

That is to say, put your house keys in the refrigerator next to your corned-beef sandwich (and then remember which to eat). 

For this very same reason, I've kept a box of thank you cards next to my bed for the past two and a half months. Earlier this year I had discovered that extending my appreciation to those in my life was a habit I wanted to build into my life. 

Of course, saying "thank you" is one of the first things we're taught as young 'uns, along with the rule of never putting your elbows on the table. Maybe its the fleeting nature of verbal gratitude or the immediate convenience of email, but showing one's appreciation through the archaic medium of pen and paper seems to land a bit more intentional for the the recipient. As for the writer's benefit, well, it can't hurt to take two minutes at the end of a day to consider those around you. 

And if you do end up trying out this experiment, I highly recommend Blue Barnhouse's Tom Hanks cards: