Can’t Knock His Hustle: Reasonable Doubt 25 Years On
“I keep it realer than most. I know you’re feelin’ it.” Photo of liner notes by Nick M. W.
By Nick M.W.
This article originally appeared on Medium.com (6/25/21).“I’d rather die enormous than live dormant.”
Hip-hop heads of any generation love arguing about who the greatest MC of all-time is. Popular metrics for this debate usually include lyrics, album sales, impact on the game, and longevity. Jay-Z checks each of these boxes. If you want to talk record sales, Hova’s career numbers are impressive. He’s one of the most commercially successful rappers ever. Lyrics? His skills are undeniable. He stuffs bars with double entendres and vivid details of street-level dealings and big pimpin’ feelings, a reservoir from which he drew from throughout his career, but not one he had to rely on to make a great song. As he aged into his 30s and 40s, he presented a more vulnerable side, putting his innermost thoughts and even his family issues on record. If you want to talk about Hova’s impact on rap music, he was a major catalyst for the genre going mainstream in the late 90s and early 2000s. He wasn’t just a rapper or a businessman. He is a business, man. Longevity? 4:44 debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 twenty-one years after he dropped Reasonable Doubt.
Biggie is one of my favorite rappers, and had he not been taken from us so soon, he might have achieved the same heights as Jay-Z. The same can be said about Tupac. Nas has had a similar trajectory to Hova without the record sales and critical acclaim, but Nas proved he can go toe-to-toe with Jigga on the mic and in the boardroom. They came from the projects, lit up the scene with their lyrical prowess and stories of survival on the streets, and became billionaires a couple decades later. It’s a remarkable achievement for both men, but I give Jigga the slight edge in the G.O.A.T. conversation because he always stayed at the top of the game. This piece isn’t about that discussion, though. It’s about Jay-Z and Reasonable Doubt, the masterpiece that launched one of the greatest solo careers in music of all-time. Happy 25th birthday!
This album is both a celebration and a melancholy reflection of the life Jay left behind, selling crack to “o-pium”, so that he could go legit and venture into the music industry not as a rapper, but as a label owner. Really, though, Reasonable Doubt was supposed to be a one-off joint for Jigga. We know how that played out. The effortless cool that Jay evokes from the opening bass line in “Can’t Knock the Hustle” to the chant of “Roc-A-Fella ya’ll” on “Regrets” became a trademark for Hova, but Reasonable Doubt is unique to his discography. This is Jay-Z’s underground album. There are no pop-crossovers. It’s simply the purest form of what he’s been selling us for two-plus decades, and it kicked off a seven-year run of albums that included four of his own personal top 5 favorites. Outside of Jay’s opinion, most of his fans would put those same four in their own top 5 favorite Jay-Z albums. Hip-hop heads might even place Reasonable Doubt at or near the top of their “greatest ever” lists.
I challenged myself to highlight my three favorite tracks from the album, and fans will surely disagree with my choices. That’s the thing about taste, though. I can hear my boy yelling at me now, “How could you leave out ‘Dead Presidents II’?” I know, right? Jay has nothing but bars on this track, but, yeah, it misses my top 3. I also struggled to leave out “Feelin’ It”. It’s a dope song that nails the album’s vibe. “22 Two’s” is razor sharp, a better battle rap than Hova’s direct assault on The Blueprint’s “Takeover”, but I left it out. “Politics as Usual” should get some love, too, with the way Ski Beatz flipped The Stylistics sample, but it’s not better than the three I love the most. I’ll take that opinion to the grave.
So which tracks did I choose?
“Can’t Knock the Hustle”
The jam that gets it all going for Jigga. It’s not an opener that smacks you in the face to let you know it’s here, like Biggie’s “Things Done Changed” or Wu-Tang’s “Bring Da Ruckus” or DMX’s “Intro” on It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot. Nah, Jay-Z just slides into the Lexus LS (fully loaded? ah, yes) and cruises down the expressway on this one. He marvels at what his grind has earned him and how much farther he’s going to go before the end of his career. He called that shot.
From the jump, Jigga shows off his skill not just with words, but with his understanding of rhyme structure. Poetry majors forgive me if I get the rhyme schemes wrong (feel free to analyze below), but Jigga switches up between coupled rhyme, alternate, and simple four-line rhyme in his first verse. Peep the style.
Yo, I’m making short term goals, when the weather folds
Just put away the leathers and put ice on the gold
Chilly with enough bail money to Free a big Willy
High stakes, I got more at stake than Philly
Shopping sprees, cop in three
Deuce fever, IS’s fully loaded, ah, yes
Bouncing in the Lex Luger, tires smoke like Buddha
50 G’s to the crap shooter, niggas can’t fade me
Chrome socks beaming through my peripheral I see ya scheming
Stop dreaming, I leave your body steaming
Niggas is fiending, what’s the meaning?
I’m leaning on any nigga intervening
With the sound of my money machine-in’
My cup runneth over with hundreds
I’m one of the best niggas that done it, six digits and running
Y’all niggas don’t want it, I got the Godfather flow
The Don Juan DeMarco, swear to God, don’t get it fucked up
That’s a hard flex. Remember, he’s not writing any of this stuff down either. He’s putting it together in his head and delivering it directly through the microphone.
“Can’t Knock…” is one of my favorite tracks off Reasonable Doubt because it’s the genesis of Jay-Z. We hear it happen one-minute into the song, and we follow the young hustler-turned-rapper for 14 tracks. As a major bonus to the song, Mary J. Blige blesses the hook with her soulful, afflicted voice.
“Brooklyn’s Finest”
This is one of my favorite hip-hop songs and is my favorite Jay-Z collab. Two hip-hop legends together going toe-to-toe, blow-for-blow. Biggie’s career had ascended to superstar status. Hova, the new jack on the scene, was ready to get it cracking. The exchange between the two of them is so fluid and natural. You would have thought they had been doing this together for years, but they met the same night that Jigga recorded his verse. More on that later. Check these opening bars, though. This is how you hook an audience.
(Jay-Z)
Ayo, peep the style and the way the cops sweat us (uh-huh)
The number one question is can the feds get us (uh-huh)
I got vendettas in dice games against ass bettors (uh-huh)
And niggas who pump wheels and drive Jettas
Take that with ya
(Biggie)
Hit ya, back split ya (uh)
Fuck fist fights and lame scuffles (uh)
Pillow case to your face, make the shell muffle (woo)
Shoot your daughter in the calf muscle (mhm)
Fuck a tussle, nickel-plated
Sprinkle coke on the floor, make it drug-related (haha)
Most hated
The story behind this song, according to DJ Clark Kent (producer of this track and two others on Reasonable Doubt), is pretty wild. You can hear him tell it at around 7:15 here, but I’ll just mention that the recording of this track gave significant credibility to the rumor that Jay-Z didn’t write down his lyrics. He recorded his verse in 20 minutes, without writing it down because he never did. Biggie had to work on his verse for a couple of MONTHS before he recorded it, and the experience of watching Hova do what he did changed Biggie’s approach to writing. Jay-Z gets the slight advantage over his sparring partner here because of the nature of how this song was recorded.
Regardless, both emcees brought out their big guns and murdered the track. They re-connected on “I Love The Dough” (from Biggie’s Life After Death), but could only manage the two tracks together because of Biggie’s murder, a damn shame on many levels. Selfishly, when I think about how good Watch the Throne is, I immediately lament the fact that we never got a Biggie/Jay-Z album.
“Can I Live”
While I’m watching every nigga watching me closely
My shit is butter for the bread they wanna toast me
I keep my head, both of them, where they supposed to be
Hoes’ll get you sidetracked then clap from close feet
I don’t sleep, I’m tired […]
Just over halfway through the album, Jay hits us with another smooth jazzy track (produced by Irv Gotti), but this one moves away from the braggadocios shot-calling Jigga did on “Can’t Knock the Hustle” or the laid back ruminations on success he spits on “Feelin’ It”. The content in “Can I Live” is dense with paranoia and tension, the kind that affects a kingpin when they’re at the top watching up-and-comers plot to challenge them. You might even hear that stress in Hova’s voice, ever so slightly.
“Can I Live” is also perfectly set in the track list between “22 Two’s” and “Ain’t No Nigga”. It feels like an opportunity for Jay to catch his breath after lighting up contenders with the preceding track before he sprints to the finish with the following tracks.
Reasonable Doubt is filet mignon. You eat up the entire album because there are no throwaway tracks. Jay-Z is focused, and all the producers came through with beats to match. Very few debut albums feature an artist who appears as seasoned at their craft as Jay-Z did. Think about it. Those who have pulled off the same feat are often the same names mentioned as the greatest MCs, like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
For different reasons, none of those other MCs managed to rock the mic as consistently, and for as long, as Hova has. There’s a bit of luck involved to sustaining success like that. You have to survive the game long enough, and you have to have the skills and the savvy to pull it off. Jigga checks those boxes, and it’s been an incredible run. A thousand-mile journey that began with Reasonable Doubt.
