“I’m just, tryin to stay above water y’know
Just stay busy, stay workin
Puff told me like, the key to this joint
The key to staying, on top of things
is treat everything like it’s your first project, knahmsayin?
Like it’s your first day like back when you was an intern
Like, that’s how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry”

–Notorious B.I.G., interview

“It’s my life - it’s my pain and my struggle
The song that I sing to you it’s my ev-ery-thing
Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first
And my thirst is the same as - when I came
It’s my joy and my tears and the laughter it brings to me
It’s my ev-ery-thing”

–Jay Z, “My 1st Song,” chorus

I hope everyone enjoyed their labor day weekend. As the American summer comes to a close (it’s a strangely Fall-like 62 degrees out here in Chicago) and students of all sorts return to school, perhaps it’s a good time to reflect on what labor means to hip hop, and how hip hop’s work ethic is different and/or similar to the “American” work ethic.

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of my time studying for the Graduate Records Examination. Although my efforts to get a solid score on this challenging test certainly pale in comparison to the daily grind of those people who are working more than one job, raising a family, and waking up every morning to do the same thing, every once in while I need want something to help keep me go’n. And whenever I feel like one of my textbooks is enervating me (“enervating” is one of these fancy GRE words that I now feel the need to use in order to remember them), I’ll usually turn to hip hop music. One particular song has been getting a lot of play recently: Jay Z’s “My 1st Song”

In “My 1^st Song,” which appropriately concludes Jay Z’s “retirement” album (The Black Album), Jay articulately describes his own work ethic. Over a waltzing bluesy beat, Jay first offers a rhetorical question, “Ya’ll wanna know why he don’t stop / Ya’ll wanna know why he don’t flop / Let me tell you people why / Came from the bottom of the block I.” What follows is a story about battling adversity, setting goals, pushing personal limits, and ultimately arriving a triumphant moment.

But Jay’s story isn’t a simple tale of individualism, self-determination, and pulling one’s self up by his own bootstraps. Although he joyfully proclaims that he is now “on top in the spot that I earned,” he also lets the listener know that he had to “take advantage of the luck you handed / or the talent you been given.” This is aspect of personal accomplishments that many Americans have a hard time accepting. In American society, the myth of the individual tends to allow no room for the “luck you handed” or the “talent you been given.”

Instead of thinking about the circumstances that have allowed powerful individuals to rise in American society, we sometimes give in to the appealing idea that these individuals did everything on their own, with no one’s help—we remove them from their societal context. What Jay is say’n is that he might have managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps, but, at the same time, he’s also say’n that he didn’t do it on his own.

He also argues that his own rise to stardom and power, like many other people’s rise, was not without its flaws. In the first verse of the song, he discusses how drug deal’n played a role in the development of his character. Although many critics of hip hop might vehemently declare that Jay is just another example of a rapper glorifying the drug trade, these critics are missing the subtext here, probably because they can’t hear the heart of the song over their own blow-hard voices. Jay is not glorify’n the drug trade; he’s speaking his mind about it in order to illustrate the fact that many youths get caught up in it, and, tragically, many cannot get out of it.

He is say’n that he is one of the lucky ones, calling on people to recognize the fact that many youths aren’t handed any luck or given the opportunity to develop their talent. Jay’s swagger certainly reflects some aspects of the American myth of individualism, but his rhymes also shatter some of those reflections. He paints himself as someone in the middle—pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, but also acknowledging where those boot straps came from.

Jay’s perception of his own work ethic shapes, and is shaped by, the work ethic that other hip hop artists have striven to develop. Tomorrow, I’ll dig a little deeper and try to discuss the bigger picture of hip hop’s work ethic. Tonight, there’s study’n to be done.

My 1st Song Video

Lyrics