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On “Renegade,” his 2001 collaboration with Eminem, Jay-Z asks, “Do you fools listen to music or just skim through it?” It’s a line he references while retracing the contours of his decades-long career during “Jay-Z
in 8,” HBO’s eight-part docuseries in which he sits down with producer and industry legend Rick Rubin to dissect both hits and deep cuts from his discography. People think, he says, that “this music is just all about glorifying the lifestyle or all about money and cars. It’s like, you’re not listening.”
The question of whether anyone tuning in is missing the meaning behind the lyrics is purely rhetorical when it comes to “Jay-Z in 8,” a thoroughly technical yet often superfluous exploration of the rapper’s life and career. Directed by Rubin, the docuseries is set in Paris’ Palais Brongniart, where Rubin cues up songs, seemingly at random, that Jay then unpacks, often word by word. It’s a reinforcement not just of Jay-Z as a whip-smart lyricist but of rap as an art form itself, a medium for opportunity and introspection.
Jay-Z has, of course, attempted a similar exploration of his lyrical acuity in the 2010 pseudo-memoir “Decoded,” where he annotated 36 songs and shared personal anecdotes. But “Jay-Z in 8” feels more interpersonal between artist and listener, as if he’s drawing a direct line to his experiences by revealing his hand, card by card. For as much of a public figure that Jay has carved over the decades, he rarely gives interviews — he did a total of one this year, and zero in the few years before it — so it feels particularly revelatory that Jay is willing to share so much, so openly, in such a bare and exposing format.
It makes sense that he’d opt for such an exhaustive deep-dive on his work amid a year celebrating its breadth and impact. After nearly a decade of musical dormancy — he last released a solo album in 2017 with “4:44” — he returned not with new music but a string of celebratory concerts including a one-of-a-kind headlining set at Philadelphia’s Roots Picnic and three back-to-back, sold-out nights at Yankee Stadium in July to commemorate the 25th and 30th anniversaries of his seminal “The Blueprint” and debut “Reasonable Doubt.” By year’s end, he will have played another two shows at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium, all without so much as the whisper of a new project.
And so Jay centers the conversation on everything that’s led up to now with “Jay-Z in 8,” meticulously picking apart the words that power everything from smashes (“99 Problems,” “Empire State of Mind”) and fan favorites (“Brooklyn’s Finest,” “U Don’t Know”) to much deeper cuts, some that Jay seems genuinely surprised to hear (“Don’t You Know”). For longtime fans, “Jay-Z in 8” is the pot of gold at the end of a very long rainbow: Jay dives into his verses, reciting them back to an awed Rubin, weaving in explanations so casually that it’s sometimes hard to discern where the lyric begins and explication ends.
These moments reveal the genius of Jay-Z, whose life story is coded directly into the songs booming through the two speakers situated across from them. He walks Rubin through his writing approach, recalling how quickly he records his projects (“The Blueprint” took about a weekend) and how he prefers to concoct entire songs in his head. He zeroes in on turns of phrase and double entendres that even Rubin didn’t catch until now — “I keep one eye open like CBS,” for instance, is a reference to the network’s logo, but also phonetically sounds out to “see BS,” or bullshit.
A barefooted Rubin is often dazzled throughout “Jay-Z in 8,” replying “wow” and “incredible” or simply meditating on what he’s just heard by closing his eyes and nodding. He serves as both a co-star and director of “Jay-Z in 8,” which is gorgeously shot in black-and-white and does a lot with the set’s simplicity. That’s in part because Rubin lets the camera linger at just the right time — at the start of Chapter 4, for example, Jay-Z speaks of reconciling with his estranged father at the behest of his mother around the recording of “The Black Album.” He describes the relief he felt at making peace with his dad before he died a month later; you can see the purity of emotion across his face as the camera’s gaze remains unbroken.
To his credit, Rubin does ask engaging and thoughtful questions throughout “Jay-Z in 8,” often prompting Jay to think of his experiences in new ways. But “Jay-Z in 8” stops short of plumbing something deeper. Rubin has had a long relationship with Jay over the decades — he produced “99 Problems,” and recalls meeting Jay for the first time when he offered to switch seats with him on a cross-country flight — and the familiarity between them is both a boon and a bog to their exchanges.
When they revisit “Kill Jay-Z,” a song where Jay raps about stabbing a record executive in the late 1990s and the infamous elevator incident where Solange attacked him in 2014, they merely skim the surface, briefly chatting about how it’s an exercise in killing off the ego. As they listen to Jay’s verse from Kanye West’s “Jail,” they talk about how West took issue with Jay’s reference to a “red cap” — a double entendre for the MAGA cap that West wore and also “cap” as a colloquialism for fronting — but nothing about the issues that exist between them today. Any interviewer with distance from Jay, or perhaps refined skills as a journalist, may have approached the tracks more directly, and some topics here feel like they’re weighted with unturned stones.
What Jay is willing to share can be illuminating, and there are tons of small details to feed even the most casual of fans. For instance, he reveals that he initially wanted to put Mary J. Blige on “Empire State of Mind” but later went with Alicia Keys due to the piano on the instrumental; his feud with Nas dated back to his debut album “Reasonable Doubt,” which was supposed to feature him on a track until he never showed up for a scheduled session; he should have held “Public Service Announcement (Interlude)” for the project after “The Black Album,” and “Encore” would have been a better first single than “Change Clothes.” Much of this is explored in a standalone interview episode, where Rubin asks him simple yet effective questions like, “Have you ever been misunderstood? or “Have you ever been the betrayer?”
There is so much in “Jay-Z in 8” that by the end, it borders on excess. Some song explorations here, particularly in the final episode, don’t speak to anything more than what’s being said on the record. A keener edit would have made for a smoother watch across the episodes, whose lengths range from 37 to 61 minutes. But this is Jay-Z we’re talking about, the same artist who released an album every year from 1996 to 2003. As he’s said before, listening can be a passive sport, but the reward is in the details if you’re just willing to look a bit closer.
The first two episodes of “Jay-Z in 8” premiere on HBO and HBO Max on Sept. 18 at 8 pm ET, with two new episodes debuting every Friday.
