I never knew I would take it this far when I wrote my first post on Jay-Z, but after that first post it almost felt necessary. A homie read the first post and quickly asked what I saw as being the main difference/s between Jay-Z's path vs. Nas path (after all, I am an admitted Nas slappy). It was a good question; at the time I knew who I liked more, and that it wasn't close for me. It was time my ears and I had a talk to learn the why.
Although I was substantially complete with my "work" here earlier in the week, I knew I had a few more nights in the hotel to listen to tunes, coupled with a three-hour drive on Friday to seal the deal. I wanted to be sure.
Luckily, there weren't 30 tough decisions to fight internally over, just a couple, one of which being the most important. #1 - 'I Love the Dough' (B.I.G., Jay-Z) vs. Verbal Intercourse (Rae, Ghost, Nas). At first I was so sure I was going with 'Verbal Intercourse', I even printed the below table to .JPG on Wednesday, due to the reality that I sided with Nas on nearly every single song. I continued to listen. I even went back outside of the top 30 to see if I wasn't giving something else enough credit (there were minor discrepancies, but nothing significant).
I focused more heavily on Jay-Z on the drive home from the Queen City yesterday. "Am I being fair enough?" It wasn't until I hopped off on I-540 (ah, two minutes left in the 4th quarter) that I realized I had been lying to myself. The little voice whispered, "there is no way that you can listen to both songs and conclude that 'Verbal Intercourse' is a better track than 'I Love the Dough'.'
And there really wasn't. To me, 'I Love the Dough' stands up to them all. Not saying it is my favorite song, but I could make an argument for it. Definite top 10, perhaps top 5.
You see, Jay-Z's top-end tracks are:
My largest deciphering point between these two is the amount of gold (as Nas top-ends are equally filthy). Based on their studio albums, it was probably a wash. Illmatic and Reasonable Doubt were both equally great and yielded nearly equally great songs. Stillmatic and The Blueprint paired well too. In doing this second exercise, however, after combing through every appearance, the discrepancy was laughable.
It was tough for me to a fill a top 30 features for Jay-Z. I didn't feel comfortable with the last 12-15 I posted or the next 12-50 that I didn't post bu re-listened to Thursday and Friday. Where I ended up was the the lesser of evils. I was only a quarter of the way through Nas' appearances when I realized I was already moving songs out of Nas' top 30 that I thought were far better tracks than the back end of Jay-Z's top 30.
Jay-Z did not work with as many people as Nas, which in turn lead to less appearances, less sick verses outside of his studio albums, and less work with classic producers (speaking of which, 9th Wonder remixes of Jay-Z sound about 10x better than the studio production). Again, as stated in my initial post, it's not as if Jay-Z was not a successful person. I can't blame him for not putting in the work Nas did in this regard. He was just putting the work in elsewhere. Let's not kid ourselves - Hov' has a serious grind. I suppose you could argue their beginnings were similar, but come '96-'98 there were very few similarities; their careers took too entirely different paths. If Jay-Z had never gotten as big he damn well may had the library of features Nas did, but he saw opportunities elsewhere and capitalized in such an enormous way.
Could he have been the best musically? I think this whole exercise would have been a lot more difficult if he had, but I also don't want to get in the habit of "would have been, could have been" unless we are talking about the late Sean Taylor.
Although I feel so strongly that this aspect of Nas' body of work crushes Jay-Z's in one of those good ol' "not remotely close" type-questions, this too is simply a preference. Keep in mind I am not arguing music because I feel something is right or wrong, or in hopes other will agree with me. Music should not be an argument - the most remarkable thing about music is that it is YOUR preference.
Oh, the list.
Stay thirsty.
On a side note, I apologize about the YouTube links breaking. For some reason, they show up fine on some computers but I noticed they don't work on others.
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