The Greatest Lyric of the Decade Gone Past (and the Greatest Album)
The greatest lyric of the past decade was very simple to decide. The combination of the words and backing music bring it to greatness in about 4 seconds.
It is a lyric that makes me phenomenally proud and glad to be alive every time I hear it. It is from a song I sang word for word with utter glee and abandon, drenched with rain and caked in mud, at All Points West last summer. It is a lyric that makes me forget who I am. It is a lyric that is great beyond what it says, great unto what it speaketh.
Conveniently, this lyric also occurs on the greatest album of the decade.
From Public Service Announcement. Jay-Z. The Black Album. 2003.
At 0:19:
Allow me to reintroduce myself: My name is HOV.
As we come to understand joy we come to understand the versions of ourselves we fear most. We come to understand our capacity to cause anguish in the world, and thus we come to understand our ability to diminish it by reinventing ourselves.
As Young HO says later, “you was who you was before you got here.” We do not change our essence. We can choose to shade it or to flame it, but we cannot change it. Ever. Reinventing and unveiling are two kinds of purification. Sloughing away layers of old self to get at the taproot of our humanity.
None of this speaks to goodness or purity. Only essence. Before he leaves, HOV is back, but only as himself. That he is HOV is not new. He is reintroducing himself as the man he has always been.
During the decade when towers fell and grandeur failed mankind did what it has always done, what it will do until the final lamplight snaps to black: take that which is old and make it new. Rebirth and redemption. Allow me to find the hanged man.
