Lucky for Jay, “the year ‘94”, so he was safe. So: Was the cop legally wrong? The Roberts court ruled in 2004 that you no longer need probable cause for a K-9 search, all you need is “reasonable suspicion,” which the cop likely had in this fact pattern (see Illinois v. RapGenius says: During the incident in question, the cop unknowingly pulled Jay over with drugs stashed away in the car, but - because the K-9 unit he called in didn’t show - was forced to let Jay go. Jay-Z says: “This dialogue is about the tension between a cop who knows that legally he’s dead wrong for stopping someone with no probable cause other than race, and a narrator who knows he’s dead wrong for moving crack.” “Well we’ll see how smart you are when the canine comes” (“99 Problems”) Jay’s new preference for leases speaks to his increased risk-aversion with age. lease” decision is quite complex: Your budget and preferences, as well as depreciation tables and resale values for the model you’re considering, ought to be taken into consideration. RapGenius says: Jay is jumping from one extreme to another, when in reality the “buy vs. Cars lose value the minute they leave the lot.” Jay-Z says: “Advising to buy a car rather than lease speaks to my naïveté at the time. “We don’t lease / we buy the whole car, as you should.” (“Can I Live”)
Vulture got RapGenius to provide their ten favorite examples. They’ve already tackled all 36 songs in the book (plus 75 other Jay-Z tracks), and while Decoded is undeniably a more handy tray for rolling joints (unless you’re using an iPad) it turns out that, here and there, RapGenius’s close textual analysis does prove more insightful than Hov’s own. What better source could there possibly be? How about, the world’s premier rap-lyric-explanation website. The bulk of Jay-Z’s new book Decoded, out this week, consists of a lyrical exegesis of 36 of Jay’s own works.