On Kanye West’s new song, “So Appalled,” Jay-Z raps, “I’m so appalled, I might buy the mall, just to show […] how much more I have in store.” As Jay’s protégé’s album dropped this week (and leaked much earlier on the web), Jay himself ...

Image Credit: Jori KleinLast night at the New York Public Library, Jay-Z and noted scholar Cornel West talked for two hours about the rapper’s new memoir, Decoded. Their free-wheeling discussion began with Jay-Z’s life and lyrics and expanded to touch ...

Jay-Z is a great American artist — and he’d be the first to tell you so. “Decoded” is an elegantly designed, incisively written bid for cultural legitimacy by a man whose XXL ego is underscored by an equally outsized inferiority complex (as big ...

The name of Jay-Z’s first book is “Decoded,” a curious title given that among the work of celebrated rappers his lyrics might need perhaps the least decoding. Unlike the Wu-Tang Clan, for instance, whose arcane allusions, slang neologisms and ...