A couple of decades later, it’s genuinely boring to hear Jay and Nas, now on good terms, rapping on a song together. A young Kanye West chopped up the Jackson 5’s immortal ebullience while Jay justified his conspicuous consumption in terms that were compelling if not convincing: “I do this for my culture, to let ’em know what a n***a look like when a n***a in a Roadster.” Other than his guest appearances, “Izzo” was Jay’s first top-10 pop-chart hit, but the song probably didn’t stoke excitement for The Blueprint as much as the promise of this new Jay/Nas feud did. “Izzo (HOVA),” the first proper single from The Blueprint, was, to that point, the biggest hit in Jay-Z’s career. A couple of months later, Nas responded with more wild-eyed fury than anyone thought possible, and the whole sideshow became an enormously fun distraction for those of us who were already sick of stressing over the wars to come.
With “Takeover,” though, Jay laid out his cards and held very little back. Those issues had come out in sly and oblique little shots that most of us didn’t notice. Petty resentments and frustrations had been building for years before Jay finally decided to kill some motherfucking ants with a sledgehammer. On “Takeover,” Jay wasn’t angry he was simply weary of having to say stuff that, in his mind, should’ve been obvious. We’d heard plenty of diss tracks before “Takeover,” but we’d never heard anything on that level, delivered with that kind of imperious boredom. Here, we had the biggest star in New York rap going after two of his rivals, naming names and calmly explaining all the reasons why they weren’t shit. For those of us who weren’t out at Summer Jam when Jay rapped the first “Takeover” verse, the idea of the song was insanely exciting. But it’s still hard to adequately describe the impact that “Takeover” had when it first arrived. I once wrote a whole book chapter about the rivalry ( Rock And Roll Cage Match, Three Rivers Press, 2008). The great Jay-Z/Nas feud of 2001 has already been discussed to death. Mostly, I wouldn’t shut up about “Takeover.” I got a promo copy at my college radio station a couple of weeks early, and I wouldn’t shut up about it. A lot of people heard The Blueprint early, and everyone who heard it went crazy. (Honestly, The Blueprint may have been the last legit five-mic album before the magazine got really goofy.) The Source was not alone in its instant-classic assessment. Upon arrival, The Blueprint got a five-mic rating in The Source - the magazine’s first perfect-score review in the three years since OutKast’s Aquemini.
Three months earlier, at Hot 97’s annual Summer Jam, Jay had launched a hyped-up war against Mobb Deep, famously flashing a picture of young Prodigy in his Michael Jackson-style dance-class tights and accusing P of being “a ballerina.” During that same show, Jay also brought the actual Michael Jackson out onstage - an unprecedented show of rap-world domination.
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He’d rapped on pop hits and toured arenas, and he hadn’t lost any of the malevolent confidence that was already in full evidence on his 1996 debut. Jay had already been on an insane run, a one hot album every one year average. The world was ready for The Blueprint to be a classic. It had basically already happened before the album even arrived. Even without that coincidental resonance, though, The Blueprint would’ve gone straight into the pantheon. Eight months later, Jay rapped with magisterial pride on Cam’ron’s “Welcome To New York City,” a local-pride anthem built on post-9/11 defiance. Less than two weeks after he released his album, Jay started a show at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom by announcing that he’d dropped on the same day as the Twin Towers.
Jay himself has something to do with that he started using catastrophe to burnish his own myth right away. After 20 years, the album’s whole story is still inextricable from the 9/11 attacks. That accident of scheduling has always been a part of the myth of The Blueprint. You might’ve just witnessed a generational horror, but you could still throw Jay on your headphones and feel indestructible. If a new Jay-Z album was out, then you went and bought that shit immediately. The world had changed, but some things remained unquestioned. On that calamitous morning, when people didn’t know if New York was under attack or the world was ending or what, people still found their ways to record stores or Best Buys, and they still bought The Blueprint. Jay-Z’s opus wasn’t supposed to come out on September 11, but Jay was worried about bootleggers - he was always worried about bootleggers - and so he moved up the album release a week.
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I know multiple people who woke up one Tuesday morning, watched from windows or Brooklyn rooftops as the second plane hit and the World Trade Center fell, and then went out and bought The Blueprint.
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