11 for the families of fallen police officers and firefighters. To celebrate his new album, “The Blueprint 3” (Roc Nation/Atlantic), he held a benefit concert on Sept. But with stakes that huge, it also makes superstardom a career necessity, and ever since making the deal Jay-Z has been remaking himself as a genre-crossing populist.Īt the All Points West festival in Jersey City this summer, for example, he performed the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” which could be read as a tribute, a canny play for wider appeal, or both. Worth an estimated $150 million, it gives him an exceptional amount of control over every aspect of his career, from records to tours to product endorsements. Last year he signed a historic 10-year deal with Live Nation, the concert giant.
In 2009, Jay-Z is bigger than ever, but he is also in need of ever larger audiences. It was quickly adopted by the Yankees and has long been played after every home game in a 1987 concert, Sinatra introduced it as “the national anthem.” Sinatra was well past his peak in 1980 when he released “New York, New York” written by John Kander and Fred Ebb for Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film of the same title, and first sung by Liza Minnelli yet the song became a hit on a level that the charts can’t register.
Jeter apparently wasn’t offended: he often used the song as his at-bat theme.)īoth have also known better than most pop stars how to continually raise the stakes of their fame. Likewise, “Empire State of Mind” contains perhaps the gutsiest lines ever sung in the presence of Derek Jeter: “I made the Yankees hat more famous than a Yankee can.” (Mr. It’s nothing but ego: “A-number-one, top of the list, king of the hill” a song about the drive to make it big, at anything. New York is all about scale, from the skyline to the ambitions it frames, which is why Sinatra’s “New York, New York” is the quintessential theme.
Jay-Z’s opening lines set up an adventure in geography and class, while at the same time rooting him in hard-knock bona fides: “I’m out that Brooklyn, now I’m down in TriBeCa/Right next to De Niro, but I’ll be hood forever.” The video, directed by Hype Williams, goes into iconography overdrive, with quick jump-cuts to the Brooklyn Bridge, Rockefeller Center, the Wall Street Bull and so forth. ”), or “New York, New York” from the musical “On the Town” (“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”), it offers a panoramic, postcard view of the city, leaping from landmark to distant landmark. Like the early Rodgers-Hart hit “Manhattan” (as in “I’ll take Manhattan. To some degree, “Empire State of Mind” fits perfectly with other big-time New York tributes. Yet in 2009 who but Jay-Z could pull it off, if he can pull it off at all?
It takes more than shout-outs to Spike Lee, however, to make a true New York anthem a song that embodies the spirit of the city and burns itself into the collective consciousness, destined for stadium sing-alongs and movie soundtracks. His boast about being the new Sinatra is no accident, nor are the lines that follow: “Since I’ve made it here,” he raps, “I can make it anywhere.” And with “Empire State of Mind” he is shooting not only for popularity but also for a symbolic crown: the king of New York music. Bloomberg or the New York Yankees, whose victories last week seemed almost foregone conclusions, Jay-Z is the kind of invincible New York archetype who nevertheless campaigns relentlessly for dominance. 11, or at MTV’s Video Music Awards two days later, or at Yankee Stadium for Game 2 of the World Series, then perhaps you caught the recently released love-letter-to-skyscrapers video, or heard it blasting out of a car somewhere. If you didn’t see him perform it at Madison Square Garden on Sept. The song, “Empire State of Mind,” breaks down as roughly 50 percent rote Jay-Z chest-beating (“I’m the new Sinatra”), 30 percent tourist-friendly travelogue (“Statue of Liberty, long live the World Trade”) and the rest a glorious Alicia Keys hook. JAY-Z started spreadin’ the news in September, and since then he has taken every prominent opportunity to remind us: he has a candidate for a new New York anthem, and he wants our votes.