Lead single Ain’t No Nigga’, the inexplicably popular collaboration with Foxy Brown, is still fucking awful: badly produced, lazily executed, a career nadir for the pair of them. At the same time, Jigga – as if conscious of hip-hop’s looming underground/mainstream schism – drafted in Gang Starr beatmaker and New York underground figurehead DJ Premier and Ski Beatz, once of the semi-obscure Bizzie Boyz, to craft the street level bangers.Īll that said, the album’s not without its flaws. Musically, Jay Z’s later LPs often stumbled clumsily into crass commercialism, but here he finely matched his aspirational rhymes with equally luxurious sonics (the ridiculously smooth ‘Cashmere Thoughts’ beat is an inspired reworking of Hamilton Bohannon’s ‘Save Their Souls’). Meanwhile, Jigga’s relaxed, conversational rhyme style stood in sharp contrast to the rather convoluted rapid-fire tongue-twisting delivery he’d employed back in 1990, working best on the LP’s melancholic moments such as ‘Politics As Usual’: “Sucking me in like a vacuum, I remember/Telling my family: “I’ll be back soon” - that was December/’85 and Jay-Z rise, 10 years later/Got me wise still can’t break my underworld ties/I wear black a lot.”
Blige-featuring ‘Can’t Knock The Hustle’ was a perfectly-pitched R&B/rap crossover. And with the genre beginning to make major mainstream moves - the Fugees’ ‘The Score’ was building serious momentum by this point - the Mary J.
On ‘Cashmere Thoughts’, he declared himself “the ghetto’s Errol Flynn, hot like heroin”, while the back-and-forth master/apprentice structure of ‘Coming Of Age’ still sounds great today. Of course, no one took him seriously.Īnd so, beneath all the Moet, Cristal and Lexus endorsements on the surface, the LP bubbled with strong ideas which would become familiar hip-hop tropes well into the new millennium, setting Shawn Carter firmly on the road to rap superstardom.
Indeed, in the run-up to the release of ‘Reasonable Doubt’, he’d rather arrogantly teased that it would be his one and only album, promising to quit rapping once it dropped. The LP dropped just as hip-hop was beginning to fracture into two distinct ideological camps.Īfter a fairly inauspicious early career - initial moves with fellow Brooklynite Jaz-O at the start of the ‘90s were followed by a handful of guest verses for the likes of Big Daddy Kane and Big L in which he was roundly outclassed – Jay Z had begun to grow in confidence, not least on 1994’s fine ‘In My Lifetime’ 12”. On the flipside, however, backpackers baulked at the rampant materialism and seemingly-endless self-glorification on display, which they felt ran counter to hip-hop’s early ethos. A spirited underground scene – which would later be defined by artists such as MF Doom, Dilated Peoples and Sir Menelik and storied independent labels like Rawkus, Fondle ‘Em and Stones Throw – was set against a glitzy, chart-primed brand of mainstream rap obsessed with designer labels and luxury living, spearheaded by Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy Entertainment label, rappers like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown and, of course, Jay Z himself.Īgainst this backdrop of a seemingly-unbridgeable chasm between hip-hop’s rival backpack and shiny suit factions (which came swiftly on the heels of the ruinous east coast-west coast war), Jay Z’s champagne-swigging swagger firmly split the rap cognoscenti almost immediately: many praised Jigga’s vivid rapping-as-hustling ambitions and often-heartfelt hood reportage, which bristled with the long lineage of ‘playa’ rap pioneered by LA legend Ice-T and Oakland’s Too $hort. The LP dropped just as hip-hop was beginning to fracture into two distinct ideological camps. Critical consensus now holds that Jay Z’s debut album is a bona fide classic, but it’s worth noting that when ‘Reasonable Doubt’ first surfaced in the summer of 1996 it was met with a markedly more mixed reception.