{"product_id":"jay-z-decoded","title":"Jay-Z - Decoded","description":"\u003cp\u003e352 pages\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eText(s) by Jay-Z \u0026amp; dream hampton \u003cbr\u003eDesigned by Rodrigo Corral\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e23,2 x 18,7 cm \u003cbr\u003eLanguage: English\u003cbr\u003ePaperback\u003cbr\u003ePublisher: One World\u003cbr\u003e2011\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eThirty-six songs, taken apart line by line and footnoted by the man who wrote them. That is the mechanism of \u003cem\u003eDecoded\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eIt is also, physically, one of the better-designed music books of its decade. Rodrigo Corral built it as an object: Andy Warhol's \u003cem\u003eRorschach\u003c\/em\u003e (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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58635166548303,"sku":null,"price":26.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2424\/8147\/files\/Jay-Z-Decoded.jpg?v=1788273759","url":"https:\/\/www.legrandj.eu\/products\/jay-z-decoded","provider":"Le Grand Jeu","version":"1.0","type":"link"}