Jay-Z: Made in America

Jay-Z is America at its scrappy, brash, irreverent, soulful, ingenious best: as transcendent a cultural icon as Frank Sinatra, as adventurous a self-made billionaire as Mark Zuckerberg, as gifted a poet as Walt Whitman. As he reaches the half-century mark, logs 30 years as a recording artist, becomes the genre's first billionaire, reigns as an elder statesman in a field teeming with artists half his age, and continues to make relevant rap records that chart - and that chart an artistic and political response to revived racism and renewed hostility to blackness - it is an auspicious time to examine Jay-Z's ideas, gifts and impact, to take measure of his stride as a cultural colossus. And there is no one better suited to the task than Michael Eric Dyson, who has investigated and championed hip hop, and the work of Jay-Z, as a critical American art form, for decades.