Reasonable Doubt

Review

One of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made.
Every rapper needs a creation myth — Illmatic opened with Nas and A.Z. counting money over snippets from Wild Style, the devil’s sons redeemed by hip-hop. Biggie opened Ready to Die with a gripping audio collage of his first twenty-odd years, as though his rag-to-riches tale was one you needed to learn. Jay opened Reasonable Doubt with a heartbeat, but its quickening pace suggested it was the sound of fear — of moving your first package; of holding your first gun; of seeing a man die; of the moment when you realize you have grown up too fast. This wasn’t an album deeply concerned with where Jay had been, since he had already built his name as a rather successful drug dealer. This album was about one man’s rebirth, and as soon as that ticking heart gave way to the gloss and floss of “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” it was clear that Jay, too, had arrived.

“My pops knew exactly what he did when he made me/ Tried to get a nut and he got a nut,” he bragged on that opening cut, as Mary J. Blige bellowed an achingly hopeful chorus borrowed from Mel’isa Morgan’s “Fool’s Paradise.” But was Jay really a “nut,” our “worst fear confirmed”? There is something cool and composed about Reasonable Doubt, as he plays straight man to Biggie’s true nut on “Brooklyn’s Finest” or earns his stripes on the icy “Dead Presidents II” — two of the finest songs of Jay’s career. “We used to fight for building blocks/ Now we fight for blocks with buildings that make a killin’,” he raps on the truly disturbing “D’evils.” But even there he sounds chillingly assured against DJ Premier’s spooked Allen Toussaint sample.

History recognizes Reasonable Doubt as evidence of Jay’s genius, but it all could have ended up very differently. Reasonable Doubt arrived during a tumultuous turn in the history of hip-hop. Nas’ disappointing It Was Written would come out a week later, and hip-hop’s obsession with the Mafioso lifestyle would soon bloat to cartoonish extremes. The Wu-Tang Clan would spool out of control, and within the next year, Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. would ascend to martyrdom. Yet the culture’s growth was still exceeding all expectations, and hip-hop would need new, larger, flashier heroes. And in Jay-Z, it found its pinnacle.