Jay-Z "Ignorant Shit"

American Gangster is, of course, a concept album about Jay-Z’s own life, appropriately cinematized, with the last third on some parallel-universe, if-I-were-not-on-Charlie Rose-a-couple-weeks-ago and still dealt drugs I’d be dead now but a dead legend level. Thus, “Ignorant Shit” (mp3) marks the stage in the narrative, I think, where the kingpin drug dealer repurposes a b-side from an earlier drug deal, changes it a bit, and puts it out officially. Or perhaps it marks a strange narrative switch in the record at which point the parallel-universe rapper Jay-Z makes an appearance in the final verse, animating a parallel between dealing and swearing through its chorus and a third, updated verse. Or, as Jay himself says at the start of the song, “I’ma really confuse y’all on this one… follow.”

The original first two verses of the song—a reconstituted Black Album scrap—remain intact, and are still as rife with highlight-reel nostalgia as so much of that record, to a large degree the “Jay-Z: the Rapper” version of the current schtick. It works, but he helps his own cause with the new chorus, located somewhere on the continuum of bad-word-bits between George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” monologue and Eddie Murphy’s “Filth Flarn” Bill Cosby impression from Raw. Just Blaze made the track for this song, but as for its smirking cultural-and-self-awareness and high-gloss synth gleam, it feels like Jay’s Graduation pastiche.

The new chorus fits so well with the verses because of its place in the album’s loose story structure. Jay the imaginary drug kingpin has long since topped out (on the undeniable “Roc Boys”), and “Ignorant Shit” marks the point where as a part of the popular culture public sphere and as a supposed role model, he’s forced to defend his position, his lifestyle, etc. In other words, the chorus is the first part of his Russell Simmons moment on the album, when he’s made a synecdochal stand-in for “rap,” “black,” “violence,” “sex,” etc. He doesn’t, like his Def Jam predecessor, make a silly, self-serving, sanctimonious PR stunt, but instead pulls off his imaginary press conference with the smart-ass charm he learned as a way-too-bright teenage crack dealer. In filmic terms, Jay does a Charlie Kaufman and merges his real and imagined selves, creating an (auto)biographical mutt who peddles swear words like rocks to passersby (“I got that ignorant shit you like,” later: “You like it, don’t front.”). “Blue Magic” isn’t the only illicit, brand-stamped merchandise on Gangster, nope.

As a linguistic anthropologist, Jay will never be mistaken for Dell Hymes, but his sincere and elegant defense (to the ever-sympathetic Rose, during their great interview) of the word choices prevalent within his chosen art form is a cultural truism so often overlooked it’s strange to hear him say it without immediately dismissing it as over-obvious (fast-forward to 9:34 for the start of the “Imus” section). The four word mantra he repeated, however—“people give words power”—only sounds like common sense (fast-forward to about 12:15 for the start of this phase). Yet when high-profile people use the wrong loaded words in the wrong public contexts, the blame just gets shifted to high-profile stand-ins for engineered moral panics. The engineers: still engineering. Words, like drugs, are culturally contingent: one man’s rock is another’s boner-pill; the latter just gets creepy commercials during football games. Jay’s Scarface/Scarface dyad in the song is, of course, a much better expression of the same sentiment (and great also because he’s able to deliver the wordy couplet without breaking his cadence). If only he weren’t so right about the confusion he mentions at the start of the song. Accidentally, but still correctly, he’s calling into question people’s ability to deal with complicated cultural issues without resorting to readymade scapegoats, and obliquely referring to the resultant sort of misinterpretation that completely (and scarily) misses the irony in Jay’s chuckled song-closing phrase: “It’s only entertainment!”