Usually when you see an album of songs 'inspired' by a movie you know the only thing a band was actually 'inspired' to do was hand over a half-finished B-side written months before the movie was actually made.
But not so with Jay-Z. Because Jay-Z, you see, has seen an early screening of the new Ridley Scott movie American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington, and liked it so much that he's decided to make an entire album about it. We're not sure what it was about the story of a black New York drug dealer who becomes a highly respected businessman that clicked with Jay-Z, but he must have enjoyed American Gangster a lot because the album is coming out in six weeks' time. It's high praise indeed for the new movie, because it's the first time that Jay-Z has based his music around a film for ages – the last time was Annie, which Jay-Z loves and wishes he could star in.
Jay-Z, it's fair to say, isn't the draw that he's always been. His last album, the retirement-shattering Kingdom Come, underperformed shockingly – something that Jay-Z blames on it being 'too sophisticated' for modern listeners even though most modern listeners might have said it had something to do with Kingdom Come being a bunch of tuneless wank made by a man bloated by wealth and too preoccupied with his sideline as a jumped-up beer salesman and his terrifying hobbies like duetting with Gwyneth Paltrow to concentrate fully on coming up with some hits.
And now Jay-Z is in an uncomfortable position. His old producer Kanye West is the biggest-selling artist of the year so far, and that leaves Jay-Z with two options – either retire for good or dig deep within himself and release a critic-defying album. Jay-Z being Jay-Z, he's gone for the latter – even though he appears to have taken 'critic-defying album' to mean 'a concept album based on a film that isn't even getting released for a couple of months yet.'
To be fair, though, that movie is American Gangster – which looks likely to be one of the films of the year – and not Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, although that's because the only word Jay-Z could find to rhyme with 'emporium' was 'crematorium' rather than his decision being based on any kind of artistic standpoint. MTV reports:
The MC/ Def Jam president told The New York Times Thursday (September 20) that he was so moved by a recent screening of the Ridley Scott-directed film that he began recording a new project, appropriately named American Gangster. The album is slated to be released November 6 on Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam Records, following the November 2 box-office debut of the movie. "It was like I was watching the film and putting it on pause and giving a back story to the story," Jay said. "Watching that film, it brought back all these memories. It took me back to those emotions."
It doesn't take a genius to see why Jay-Z responded so enthusiastically to American Gangster – give or take an embarrassing feud with Nas and a syrup-eating girlfriend who falls over a lot and possesses the ability to send people epileptic, the story shadows Jay-Z's life to an extraordinary degree. Jay-Z's American Gangster album won't be the movie's official soundtrack – American Gangster is set in the 1970s, before rapping about Hewlett-Packard endorsement packages was invented – but it will be coming out days after the movie is released in November.
It's maybe no surprise to discover that American Gangster is a Russell Crowe/ Ridley Scott movie, because this isn't the first time that Jay-Z has taken an interest in their work. His Black Album song What More Can I Say sampled Gladiator heavily, and there's also that still-unreleased CD of traditional provincial French accordion folk tunes that Jay-Z rushed out to record directly after seeing A Good Year, too.
Read more: