[Video] Jay-z: “Rap is Poetry. It’s Thought Provoking”

In what Roc 4 Life reports as a never-before-seen clip, Jay-Z shares the reasoning behind wanting to write the book Decoded. He explains that he wanted to expand the minds of people who may have put rap, and rappers, into a negative category that may come from unwarranted bias. While calling rap poetry and speaking on rappers Biggie Smalls and Rakim as examples, Jay-Z says if people would look at lyrics away from the music, they’d realize how genius rap music is:

“I hope readers take away from this book that rap is…it’s poetry. It’s thought-provoking and there’s thought behind it and there’s great writing in rap as well. You never hear rapper being compared for like the greatest writers of all time. You hear Bob Dylan, but so is Biggie Smalls. In a Hitchcock way some of the things that Biggie wrote — Rakim! I mean listen to some of the things he wrote. If you take those lyrics and you pull them away from the music and you put them up on the wall somewhere and someone had to look at them, they would say, ‘This is genius. This is genius work.’

So I want people to take that away, I want people to also take away the quick judgments. Listen to the song. Listen to its intent. Try to figure oout why a song like ‘Big Pimpin” can exist. The same way you try to figure out why a song like ‘Meet the Parents’ exists. I mean it’s clearly obvious that this has [a] different meaning but this on the surface is just as fun…party music. But there’s reasons behind that as well. So I really just wanted to lay this out in a clear and concise way that people can look at it and say, ‘Ok, and if there’s thought and there’s intelligence and there’s reason and logic behind it, then maybe I can deal with everything like that.”