Jay-Z

After the breakthrough commercial success of his previous album, 1998's Hard Knock Life, Jay-Z was the biggest rapper in the world. Vol. 3 does not mess with a winning formula. Timbaland collaborations "Big Pimpin'" and "Snoopy Tracks" are propulsive entries from the margins of pop-hop. The confessional "Dope Man" is a maudlin blood bath that paints Jigga as a (somewhat) reluctant street corner Don. And DJ Premier's "So Ghetto" is ghetto solidarity -- Jay-Z communing with his subjects. This ranks up there with Jay-Z's best.

Ok, he's reloaded. And on his fourth album, Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter, he's a
sweet contradiction. Lyrically, Jay is less introspective than he was on 1996's Reasonable
Doubt; he's more misogynous and paranoid than ever. But even as he shies away from past
vulnerable moments like "Regrets," "Lucky Me" and "You Must Love Me," Jay (born Shawn
Carter) has become a better architect of songs. This is his strongest album to dat... More >

Sean Carter isn't the first crime-linked hitmaker with a penchant for kicking broads out of bed at 6:15 in the morning. Frank Sinatra beat him to it. Right, Sinatra never boasted about his own callousness--not publicly, in song--and that's a big difference. Jay-Z has too many units tied up in playing the now-a-rapper-now-a-thug "reality" game with his customers, thugs and fantasists both, and only when he lets the token Amil talk back for a verse does he make room for female reality. But he goes for a rugged, expansive vigor, nailing both come-fly-with-me cosmopolitanism and the hunger for excitement that's turned gangster hangouts into musical hotbeds from Buenos Aires to Kansas City. You don't expect a song called "Big Pimpin' " to sound as if the tracks were recorded in Cairo. This one does. (Grade - A)