'Jay-Z: Made in America': Evolution of a hustler

When professor and author Michael Eric Dyson began teaching a class on Jay-Z at Georgetown University about a decade ago, not everyone was on board. Although the course, "Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z," was one of the most popular on campus, hip-hop was not seen as a field of legitimate scholarly inquiry.

In his book "Jay-Z: Made in America," which has its origins in that now-long-running class, Dyson uses the rapper's life story and lyrics as a lens through which to view America in the 21st century. He argues that Jay-Z is the living embodiment of American ideals, the ultimate hustler in a nation built by hustlers and strivers. "Jay-Z is America at its scrappy, brash, irreverent, soulful, ingenious best," he writes. "He is as transcendent a cultural icon as Frank Sinatra, as adventurous a self-made billionaire as Mark Zuckerberg, as gifted a poet as Walt Whitman."

Born Shawn Carter, Jay-Z spent his childhood in Brooklyn's Marcy housing projects, his early adulthood as a crack dealer, and the past two decades as hip-hop's most iconic star and first billionaire.

Dyson writes with the affection of a fan but the rigor of an academic. (Pharrell, who wrote the introduction, has no such problem with overstatement; he compares Jay-Z to the Oracle at Delphi.) Using extensive passages from Jay-Z's lyrics, "Made in America" examines the rapper's role as a poet, an aesthete, an advocate for racial justice and a businessman, but devotes much of its energy to Hova the Hustler. Hustling is central to the American character, Dyson argues, and in Jay-Z's transition from dealer to tycoon, "he has willed himself, by dint of his talent, to change from a man who sowed mayhem in his urban community to a man who gives nobler meaning to hustling."

"Made in America" is never better than when dismantling what Dyson refers to as "the politics of black masculinity." After Jay-Z's alleged infidelity prompted his wife Beyoncé to administer the painful thumping that was "Lemonade" in 2016, the rapper responded with the title track to his album "4:44," in which he admitted to finally understanding that women were actually people.

Still, there aren't many thriving hip-hop artists over 50. Dyson argues that Jay-Z's rise from the projects to the upper echelons of the Forbes list will offer him cover. "Of course, there are those in black life who will contend that Jay's success is little more than a black face on capitalism, the vicious consequences of which have often ruined black life," he writes. "That is true. But it is also true that Jay's ascent is a token of the irrepressible spirit of black folk in the face of impossible odds."