A new video clip surfaced online of Jay-Z sharing the reason behind wanting to write the book “Decoded.”
Hov explains that he wanted to expand the minds of people who may have put rap, and rappers, into a negative category that may come from unwarranted bias.
Jay-Z use legendary rapper Rakim and the late Biggie Smalls as example to illustrate that rap is poetry.
“I hope readers take away from this book that rap is…it’s poetry. It’s thought-provoking and there’s thought behind it and there’s great writing in rap as well. You never hear rapper being compared for like the greatest writers of all time. You hear Bob Dylan, but so is Biggie Smalls. In a Hitchc**k way some of the things that Biggie wrote — Rakim! I mean listen to some of the things he wrote. If you take those lyrics and you pull them away from the music and you put them up on the wall somewhere and someone had to look at them, they would say, ‘This is genius. This is genius work.”
Watch interview below.
