A rock beat, and a dog that arrived too late
The drums hit like a door. Rick Rubin’s production on 99 Problems does not swing so much as report for work: a break beaten until it is a fact, guitars that could have come from a harder decade, Jay-Z walking in already mid-argument. The hook is a boast that dares you to stop listening at the noun. He knows you might. He built the door that way. If you stay, the second verse is a traffic stop, a speed that is not a crime, a cop who has already decided what the car is for. The cleverness is not decoration. It is how a man talks when both parties are used to getting their way, and only one of them has the badge.
The track sits on The Black Album, released in November 2003, in the season Jay-Z was calling a retirement. Rubin took the hook’s shape from an older Ice-T record, a brag about women, and turned it, with Jay, toward the other side of the word problems. The beat leans on the stomp of Billy Squier’s The Big Beat, Rubin’s habit of making hip-hop feel like a band that had kicked the door. Mark Romanek’s video, the year after, staged a shooting and made MTV attach a disclaimer. The song did not need the bullets. The verse already had a more precise violence: a stop on the highway, drugs in the car, a search that does not happen because the dog is somewhere else.
Jay-Z walked through it with Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2010, and in Decoded. Driving while black was reason enough. In the lived version, he has written, they pulled off and saw the K-9 unit coming the other way, a few seconds from a different life. In the song he left the ending open, the writer preferring the ambiguity of a Western. The word that empties rooms, he said, was a provocation aimed at people who hear a buzzword and stop. In that verse the bitch is the dog. He said he was not calling a woman one, and that the opening line was there to lead the careless listener down the wrong path. The third verse spends the same noun on a different coward. Context, or nothing.
That was the writer in me being provocative, because that’s what rap should be at times. When you put it in context, you realize that I wasn’t calling any female, besides the female dog, a bitch on this song.
(Jay-Z, NPR Fresh Air, 2010)
The reading that survived in the culture is the one he baited: girl problems, none. The reading on the page is a stop-and-search, a little law, a little luck. Both can be shouted. Only one explains why the beat is so square-shouldered, why Rubin and Jay wanted rock’s bluntness under a story about who gets to open the trunk. The retirement did not last. The track did not need it to. It already sounded like a man closing a ledger and finding the same line still open.
What remains is the dog on the opposite carriageway. 99 Problems keeps its joke and its affidavit in the same bar. Laugh at the hook and you have done what the writer said you would. Read the verse and the drums are suddenly a gavel, late, loud, and not on your side.
