Jay-Z - American Gangster Review

America, I'm going to give you an outsider's view of your country. Once upon a time I sat on a train from London to Edinburgh (I was going up there for the annual Festival), when a French gentleman happened to sit next to me. Very clever guy, university lecturer. I had been listening to my music player but, out of politeness, took out my headphones in order to strike up a conversation, which we soon engaged in. We talked on all matter of subjects, and the journey flew by; I even shared my lunch with him. One thing he said stuck with me more than anything else, as we chanced upon the topic of America – he said that America was, at the same time, both the best and worst place in the world; that the highs and lows were virtually unparalleled anywhere else on Earth. I thought very carefully about what he said, and, whether right or wrong, I have passively carried his opinion with me ever since....full text With his criminally overhyped, thuddingly anticlimactic comeback album, Kingdom Come, Jay-Z offered listeners insight into the surprisingly dull life of a thirtysomething hip-hop mogul with nothing to prove and nothing much to say. The album's disappointing sales suggested that fans found the view from the boardroom infinitely less compelling than the street-corner perspective of Jay-Z's early work. On American Gangster, the hustler-turned-executive finds inspiration in the Ridley Scott film of the same name, the lush atmosphere of '70s soul, and the bracing grit of blaxploitation....full text The story goes like this: After seeing an advance print of the Ridley Scott heroin-trade epic American Gangster, Jay-Z found himself inspired. The movie details the story of the Vietnam-era Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, and Jay saw so many parallels between Lucas's life and his own. Over the course of a few weeks, Jay recorded his own widescreen epic, a concept-album about the rise and fall of a gangster like Lucas, an imagined what-if trajectory for what might have happened to Jay if he'd never left the drug trade....full text