Jay-Z at the New York Public Library

There’s an entertaining video on Fora.tv of Jay-Z’s appearance at the New York Public Library. He was with Cornel West, a philosopher, civil rights activist and Princeton professor, as well as Paul Holdengräber, the director of the event. Entertaining it was, but it was also rather strange and a tad annoying, the latter two properties being intimately tied. The whole show was soaked in a weird over-reverence for Jay-Z. This was weird in part because over-reverence is never deserved, even though it must have been somewhat difficult to avoid a reverential stance, given that Jay-Z was there to promote Decoded, a book in which he analyses the lyrics of his songs.

There were two different sorts of reverence on show. There was the reverence of the activist: that is to say, the reverence that originates in a deep desire to see everything in terms of the subject of your activism. For Mr West, Jay-Z was not just a talented rapper, he was the contemporary incarnation of all black culture. Jay-Z did not merely have influences, he absorbed the spirits of the greats that went before him, Martin Luther King included. I’m not familiar with Mr West’s work. Perhaps it is simply an element of his style to vastly hyperbolise everything. But there can surely be no excuse for tortuously finding ways to compare Sean Carter with William Shakespeare.

The other sort of reverence was that of the initiate, the reverence that appears to have no points of reference, and that is so surprised to find anything at all of any artistic value that the shock overwhelms him and stunts his critical faculties. Mr Holdengräber and Jay-Z compared their musical upbringings; Mr Holdengräber’s consisted (though I’m sure he exaggerates somewhat) of different versions of The Magic Flute. His childhood was presumably quite far from Marcy Projects, and he has the understandable (and commendable) interest in lives far different from his own. But he has evidently allowed himself to be blinded by this distance, and by the fact (which should hardly be surprising) that rap can be about more than simply glorified violence.

Amidst all this, Mr Carter appeared an island of sanity and reason, here and there puncturing pomposity with wit, and appearing suitably confused by rambling improvised dissertations that only those speaking them could possibly understand (see above, and the comparison with Shakespeare). It is not as though he didn’t buy into the myth that the two who flanked him espoused with such fanatical zeal (though it was difficult to tell, and he appeared suitably distant), but he did appear more able to place it in its proper perspective.