It can’t be explained.” This is what he means when he calls himself the God MC and Jay-Hovah. “Without the pen and paper, your flow be so ridiculous.” Adds Jay, “What I have is a gift from God. “It make your flow so wicked,” Sigel says. Rapper Beanie Sigel has learned to do this from being around Jay, and says it’s made him a better MC. Sometimes, he says, there are four or five songs in his head at one time. In minutes he’s got rhymes and hooks with astounding economy and filled with his trademark double entendres. He picks a track, turns it up loud in the studio, then sits off to the side mumbling to himself. “I was in a zone.” Jay’s recording process itself is a bit miraculous.

From a 2001 interview with Rolling Stone: “The songs just started happenin’, comin’ out of nowhere,” he says. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter had a lot on his plate to deal with around the time that he was working on this album, as he was awaiting two criminal trials for assault and gun possession, and wrote and recorded nearly every song on this album over a two-day period. It’s f-cking amazing.” He was like: “No, son, we’re under attack.” And I was like: “Yeah, by dope beats by Timbaland. Oh my God, have you heard? Like, have you heard?” And I was like: “Are you talking about track 12? Yes, I’ve heard. What’s sad about that is that my father was in New York at the time, and I remember he called me and he was like: “Oh my God. Which is a great album if you haven’t heard it. I think of September 11th half of the terrorist attack and half, and more importantly to me, as the day Jay-Z released The Blueprint. I don’t think about September 11th just for the terrorist attack. You know why we pretend to be mad? Because we don’t want to appear like monsters in front of our friends, but these things don’t affect us. (If you’re reading this, and you don’t think that this album was anything resembling a silver lining and not worth writing about, just count your blessings that I’m writing about this, and not about something really controversial like John Mulaney’s relationship with Olivia Munn, or last week’s episode of Ted Lasso.) “Can I tell you the harsh reality of life? It’s that events happen - really, really sad things happen, tragedies happen every day and we all pretend to be mad. One of the very, very, very few silver linings to be found in the dark cloud that was Septemwas the release of Beyonce’s husband’s Jay-Z’s album, The Blueprint.

(I’ve honestly lost count of how many folding knives and pepper sprays I’ve purchased, but to quote Clarence Worley: It’s better to have something and not need it than to need something and not have it.) Because I can always count on being reminded as to why I carry weapons with me wherever I’m out in public, especially whenever I pay a visit to Staten Island.

When I took my mother out to lunch for her birthday this past weekend, I discovered that one of her neighbors in Staten Island has a “Trump, I Love You” sign displayed right next to a “9/11: Never Forget” sign on the front window of their house. Or how that very same week, I had to hear one of my white co-workers at McDonald’s talk about how he wanted to join the military so that he could get a gun and a uniform, and go after the same countries who attacked us in order to get some payback. About how I sat at a bus stop in Staten Island (or as I respectfully call it, Urinetown) on my way home from campus after watching news footage of the attacks, and listened to a couple of white men at that same bus stop talking to each other about how America needs to go after all of the Middle Eastern countries and kill them all for doing this, and how I silently hoped with every fiber of my being that it was other white people responsible for these attacks, and not Black and brown people who would have to deal with even more bigotry and hatred and harassment than we already do on a regular basis. I could easily throw my hat into that particular ring, and talk about my own personal experiences on that Tuesday morning. For the past few days, we have all been bombarded with words and images and hour-long news retrospectives related to the terrorist attacks that happened on September 11, 2001, due to the fact that this year marks the twentieth anniversary of what happened on that day.

Jay z blueprint 2 quotes