The Jay-Z

«I'd rather die enormous than live dormant» from Jay-Z - Can I Live

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Superhero of modern music

The return of Jay-Z happened by the end of 2006. His retirement finished as rapper released a new album Kingdom Come on November 21. This was his ninth studio album. No wonder that the album was a great success. Only during the first week after the release of the album 680 thousand copies were sold. This was one more record achieved by Jay-Z as no other singer managed to reach this scale of sales within such a short period of time. The reviews of the album were either positive or mixed.

At first the album was planned to be released under the original name of the singer, but then the popularity of his stage name played its role and Shawn Carter changed his mind. The single "Lost One" was produced by Mark Batson and Dr.Dre. The video to the song was released on December 4, the birthday of the rapper. Jay-Z turned 37 years old then. What is interesting about the video, it features the rare concept high performance sports car Maybach Excelero.

Dr.Dre in his interview said later that he had to study theory of music and piano too in order to work over this song. This was an interview to the Scratch magazine.

There were plenty of rumors concerning the verses of the song. Some said that the first verse told about Jaz-O, the partner and mentor of the rapper, when he was beginning the career, or Damon Dash, the business partner, with whom Jay-Z co-founded Roc-a-fella Records. The second verse is said to be either about Beyoncé or Rosario Dawson, an American actress, singer and girl-friend of Jay-Z in the period from 2000 to 2002.

The third verse told about Colleek D.Luckie, the nephew of Jay-Z, who died in the road accident driving the graduation present of Jay-Z, Chrysler 300.

Jay-Z collaborated again with Kanye West, Just Blaze working over the album, but Dr.Dre played more active role that time in the production of the album. To be more particular, 4 beats were produced by him and he also mixed all songs in the album. Among new people working with Jay-Z were Scyience, B-Money, and DJ Khalil, Angeles Records co-owner. The singer of Coldplay Chris Martin also contributed to the album. The opening track in the album "The Prelude" is characterized by the presence of additional vocals and the return of hip hop musician Pain in da Ass, who frequently featured on the introductions of the early albums of the rapper, representing characters from movies, for instance Goodfellas, Scarface, Carlito's Way.

Carl Crawford, the left fielder playing for Tampa Bay Rays of MLB (Major League Basketball) uses the song "Dig a Hole" as the entrance song. The Fox Broadcasting Company, an American television network, frequently referred to as Fox, used one of the versions of the song "Oh My God" promoting TV series "24" (the sixth season). One of the album tracks, #3 had the same name as the album. It was under 98th position in the chart Billboard Hot 100 and took 99th place in Pop 100.

The name for the album was born in a curious way. Once the producer and engineer of Roc-a-Fella told Jay-Z about the comics Kingdom Come. This 4 issue comic book was published in 1996. According to it the superman returns after the retirement to teach the coming generation to become super heroes. This way it was supposed that Jay-Z saved hip hop.