352 pages Text(s) by Jay-Z & dream hampton Designed by Rodrigo Corral 23,2 x 18,7 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: One World 2011
Thirty-six songs, taken apart line by line and footnoted by the man who wrote them. That is the mechanism of Decoded, and it is a stranger idea than it sounds: a rapper at the peak of his commercial power stopping to explain the double meanings, the borrowed slang, the Marcy Projects references and the drug-trade arithmetic buried in lyrics most listeners had been shouting along to for fifteen years. Written with dream hampton, the book moves sideways rather than forward — childhood in Brooklyn, the crack years, the record business — and treats hip-hop as a literature with its own rules, which in 2010 was still an argument that needed making rather than a settled fact.
It is also, physically, one of the better-designed music books of its decade. Rodrigo Corral built it as an object: Andy Warhol's Rorschach (1984) on the cover, art and photography running through the interior alongside the annotations, closer to a visual essay than a memoir. Worth remembering what happened around it, too — Droga5 launched the book for Bing by placing all 300-plus pages in physical locations around the world, one at a time over a month, from a billboard to the bottom of the pool at the Delano in Miami to a bronze plaque set in the Marcy Projects, with a scavenger hunt to find them. The campaign took the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011. The book you are holding was, briefly, scattered across the actual world.
