Why Jay-Z?
Traditionally, English professors have taught major author courses on figures like William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Over the last two decades, African American literature professors have taught courses on Harlem Renaissance writers, black women writers, and major author courses on Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and others. I began to think of ways to move in new directions to teach courses on major black authors. More specifically, I wondered what might happen if I used the major author approach, but inserted a significant rap artist in place of a novelist or poet?
My thoughts led me to focus on Jay-Z as not only a rapper, but as a major black author. I thought of ways that I could teach a course on Jay-Z rather than on conventional novelists and poets. This led to my ultimately offering a series of classes on this notable rap artist.
It is true that many people place Jay-Z among a cohort of legendary lyricists and moguls. But I have found that my students, educators, and even rap fans who push for the genre to have widespread acceptance, may still wonder what makes Jay-Z worthy of focused attention in a digital humanities literature course.
In response to such questions about the purpose of making Jay-Z the focus of a literature course, I often return to the following three reasons:
1. Jay-Z represents a continuing tradition of black male autobiographical narratives. His solo albums fit within a broad tradition of works by writers such as Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Malcolm X. His use of figurative language, especially his tendency to deploy similes throughout his lyrics, connects to other writers and evidences his keen ability to connect his music to a range of ideas, people, and locations.
2. Jay serves as a gateway artist to other musical artists and historical figures in American culture. His music underscores the value of sampling and signifying. His music transmits artistic and social ideas by drawing on over 600 R&B, soul, rap, funk, and jazz tracks from artists such as Nas, Biggie, Isaac Hayes, and the Jackson 5. Add that with the dozens—or should I say “hundreds”—of artists that Jay-Z has collaborated with over the course of his career, and he can be analyzed as an endlessly fascinating gateway, linking to countless other figures in hip hop and American pop culture.
3. Jay-Z’s work is notably data-rich. There is a large amount of accessible digitized information about the rapper and his work online. Genius, Genius’s online, crowd sourced archive contains the lyrics from all of the rapper’s albums. I fed those digitized texts into Voyant Text Mining Suite. Text mining experiments or the process of deriving high-quality information from text is used in this project to perform a broad survey of the rapper’s collective body of work.
These three reasons guide my research, writing, and teaching on the Brooklyn-born rapper.
