With all due respect, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter nowadays is more businessman than a rapper. Okay, that may sound a bit blasphemous given that he’s hit a bit of a recent hot streak. “4:44” was an album that captured an older man coming to terms with his past in mature ways, reflecting a genre that rarely allowed you to be this vulnerable. Even his collaboration with wife Beyoncé, The Carter’s “EVERYTHING IS LOVE” reflects an artist aspiring towards something more creative and fulfilling. As a musician, Jay-Z exits the 2010s with far more promise than he had going in, coming off of a few middling albums that technically weren’t supposed to happen because, ahem, he was supposed to retire with “The Black Album”... in 2003.
Here’s the reality that most of us probably realize: Jay-Z was always about the business. He began his career as a drug dealer, creating this mythology that he was successful enough to leave the game and start a bigtime rap career. He would go so far as to fill his raps with brags, including how he sold water to a well.
The fact that he became the first rapper to make a Billion dollars was no mistake. This was all meticulous. He always had this underlying policy that you were investing in something when you pressed play. That is why his albums became extremely gimmicky following the unprecedented success of 2001’s “The Blueprint.”
You don’t even have to listen to these albums to know what he was selling them as. “American Gangster” was his homage to the Denzel Washington movie. “The Black Album” was his retirement album. “Kingdom Come” was that weird comeback album with that music video featuring Dale Earnhardt Jr. Even “The Blueprint III” was sold as an elder statement taking on those youngsters using autotune.
Go ahead and try. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of his albums can be sold in one sentence. This isn’t to talk about any of their actual quality, though does Jay-Z care when he’s a billionaire?
With all of this said, his true masterpiece of gimmickry came in 2013. No, I’m not talking about the time he produced The Great Gatsby (2013) soundtrack, where he added hip-hop flavor to The Jazz Era. That was only a warm-up for his proposed plans to change the game forever. In some respects, it may be the only true achievement he made over the decade… and it was more because of the business model that attempted to make music feel relevant in a time when nobody buys albums. They bought singles off of iTunes, played music videos on YouTube. The very idea of relevance was fading, at least in the conventional sense.
And then, in his quest for all the money in the world, he signed a $20 million deal with Samsung. The plan was simple: through Samsung Galaxy S III, Jay-Z would release his new album for free to those willing to download his new Magna Carta Samsung app. Oh, and if that wasn’t sweet enough, this was going to happen on Independence Day. If Black Friday had taught us anything, it was that most people can’t pass up holiday deals.
The album was called “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” which was more than highfalutin nonsense. It was his way of connecting this album to a richer culture that spanned centuries. Seeing as songs like “Picasso Baby” was shot at The Pace Gallery in New York City, he was wanting to be a trendsetter (see also: “Tom Ford”).
As far as etymology goes, the title has two major references. The Magna Carta was a document signed by King John of England to establish a set of new rules. The Holy Grail is an object that people search for, believing that it’s sacred and holds deeper truths about the world.
Given that Jay-Z saw his release strategy, the first of its kind, as uncharted territory, it made sense that he saw it as making new rules with deeper truths. This was the kind of cocky marketing that he built his career around. After all, he loved making a pastime about comparing his greatness to The Notorious B.I.G. and that he was frankly better than most people half his age.
Of course, the biggest selling point of this album was his perceived greatness. You can only get away with the next part if you have a larger-than-life reputation, earned over decades, and meticulous partnerships.
In June of 2013, Jay-Z staked his claim on a TV spot set to air during Game 5 of The NBA Finals, featuring The Miami Heat and The San Antonio Spurs. The belief was that he would have the best shot at reaching the widest audience. So, over a three-minute video, he found himself in a studio with producers Timbaland, Rick Rubin, Swizz Beats, and Pharrell Williams working on the album. They compliment themselves on the beats, which are unfinished and don’t feature actual vocals. Through the course of the conversation, it is revealed that this unknown album is scheduled for a July 4, 2013 release date. As everyone laughs, thinking that they struck gold, the commercial cuts to a link: MagnaCartaHolyGrail.com.
What was this madman thinking? How could he possibly get away with this new strategy? Some could argue that it was his attempt to do something that rarely happened by 2013. He wanted to sell a million copies in one day. Seeing as this was new territory, it wasn’t entirely clear how successful this would be. For those who didn’t get in on the deal, you just had to wait 72 hours, or July 7, to purchase it.
The attention was on Jay-Z, and it came with all of the familiar aspects of marketing. Once the cover art was revealed, it became clear that Jay-Z wasn’t comparing himself to anything modern or trendy. No, he was a billionaire in the making who wanted to party at art galleries and use high-concept artwork as his model of success. If he pulled this off, “Magna Carta Holy Grail” would be in a museum, where he would impress his grandchildren who would roll their eyes since he already wrote a rap track about how he accomplished more by five than they did by seven.
Even though this isn’t a review of the album, it feels important to look at its place in culture. As someone who still lower case “l” liked Jay-Z, I had that curiosity to give it a listen. This couldn’t possibly be the greatest album he made. How could it when “The Blueprint” existed? I was washing dishes while my family was out watching fireworks, taking everything in. It’s definitely a good album, even if I personally remember him sounding like an old guy when he would go “Twerk Miley, twerk.” ("Somewhere in America") I get it. Miley Cyrus mentioned you in “Party in the U.S.A.” No need to act like you’re doing her a favor because it really makes you sound old.
The issue is that Jay-Z is clearly stuck in a business mode for parts of this album, trying to act like his materialism is the coolest thing about him. In fact, that may be what’s kept him from being a more accessible rapper in the past decade. Sure it works as feel-good motivation, but one has to ask: who IS his audience? The fact that he could make $20 million for this Samsung deal and not make it seem all that significant shows how much above his fans he was. If there’s any aspect of the album that resonates for me, it’s “JAY Z Blue” and “La Familia,” which find him accepting fatherhood in somewhat endearing ways. Also, “My Downfall” features a sample from Mommie Dearest (1981), and that will never not be charming.
By 2013, the myth of Jay-Z had moved beyond rapping and it makes most of his latter-day music difficult to want to revisit. It reeks of consumerism, which makes me thankful that he reinvented himself after this point. Then again, what did he have to prove after making an album that existed solely as bragging rights that he reinvented music not sonically, but through economics that has since become the norm?
Okay, back to the marketing itself. Was it actually successful? Much like Evita Perón and The Rainbow Tour, the answer is yes… and no.
The Magna Carta app achieved everything it set out to do. Those million people with Samsung Galaxy S III’s got the album for free. No qualms about that. But, it becomes much more difficult before you take on the notorious struggle with Soundscan as to whether those million sales counted.
The app itself gained controversy because of its user settings. Apparently, you couldn’t install it without providing personal information from social media. As a result, there was this belief that Samsung was participating in an invasion of privacy. While the South Korean company would publicly claim that they didn’t do that, it wasn’t enough to stop Twitter from proudly declaring that the launch of “Magna Carta Holy Grail” was a “Samsung Fail.” Jay-Z meanwhile managed to get out of this mess unscathed.
Okay, not exactly.
If you’re anyone who has been on the internet in the past 20+ years, a few red flags should be pretty obvious. Thanks to file sharing websites like Napster and Limewire, the idea of torrenting music has become more commonplace, so “Magna Carta Holy Grail” was quickly made available to those who didn’t have the app and didn’t want to wait three days. As a result, this sucker was everywhere, and not in the way that Jay-Z may have intended.
That is why you need to have Jay-Z level of clout in order to pull this off. If you were trying to do this with a lesser figure, odds are that the pirating would’ve demolished the sales immediately. In its opening weekend of physical release, The Billboard 200 reported that it had sold 528,000 copies, which bypassed expectations. In doing this, Jay-Z achieved his 13th consecutive debut atop the charts. It even spent the next week atop the charts and would go on to sell two million copies in The United States.
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| "Picasso Baby" |
Though The Recording Industry Association of America (R.I.A.A.) would change their own ruling later. In a shared statement, they granted Jay-Z the achievement of selling a million copies in one day, claiming:
The reality is that how fans consume music is changing, the music business is changing as labels and artists partner with a breathtaking array of new technology services, and the industry’s premier award recognizing artists’ commercial achievement should similarly keep pace. In short, we’re continuing to move the 55-year-old program forward and it’s a good day when music sales diversification and innovative strategies meet the RIAA’s time-tested, gold standard requisites for certification.
Congratulations, Jay-Z. You changed the industry. The fact that there wasn’t a traditional roll-out until AFTER its physical release only continued to show how good of a businessman he was. You don’t need to hear a full song. All you needed were those samples in that commercial to get you hooked. While that hat trick of “surprise release” has only become more abstract, this is the epicenter that informed how music was going to stay relevant.
Which is a bummer because, in all honesty, nobody will remember this album otherwise. He’s clearly made better music, and some of his firebrand passion feels like it’s missing on this album. There are some entertaining songs, but they’re all pop hooks that sound like he’s sticking with the trend instead of making it. As a businessman, he’s brilliant. As a rapper, he’s become more concerned about the former. He follows The ABC’s: Always Be Closing. He’s closing the deals so that the attention stays on him, but what is he really saying?
It doesn’t help that the majority of his work isn’t available on YouTube. Like this album, his investment in the music streaming service Tidal was meant to change the game. By existing years later, I guess it met its goal once again. It didn’t not make him a billionaire, after all.
However, it’s a personal struggle for me, someone who doesn’t care to buy into the umpteenth streaming service just to hear some great tunes. The world is big enough that I can just listen to people with a more genuine interest in their work, who aren’t as obsessed with selling a product, putting effort into their quality first. Jay-Z has remembered that in recent years, but the fact that you still need to go to Tidal to hear most of it shows how much of a wall he currently has up.
Though with that said, his most recent albums have been made available on his personal YouTube account as of June 2020. That’s at least some acceptance of his faults. Even then, it’s not exactly “The Blueprint.” It’s not even “The Black Album.” It’s “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” still trying to evoke relevancy all these years later. If you need to know why I call his music a “gimmick,” that’s why.
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