Jay-Z unveils 'Decoded' cover, details

Jay-Z is finally ready to reveal some details about his much-anticipated first book "Decoded," set to hit stores Nov. 16 from the Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau. (See the cover.)

Though the book has long been described as Jay’s autobiography, it will instead be more of a firsthand account of 36 of his songs and how his life experiences and the culture at large influenced their creation.

“When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics — not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC — are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history. And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.”