Jay Z?s Reasonable Doubt album, which dropped 20 years ago today, has come to be remembered as Jay-Z?s grand entrance with guns blazing, even if perception is really an abstraction. It?s the Brooklyn rapper?s favorite of his own LPs and certainly a landmark effort: a Rosetta Stone for the dope boy triumphalism, trife life storytelling, and aloof cockiness on which Jay has staked his $600 million empire that now spans music and movies, fashion, and booze. But then too, it?s an executive precis?the real Blueprint that defined Jay-Z with an inexplicable umlaut over the ?Y? before he was the em-dash-abolishing Jay Z?laying out Mafia-inspired homilies, spelling out the ?Lexuses/diamond necklaces? lifestyle at the heart of his self-creation myth, and broadcasting his arrival as Jay-Hova: the God MC.
