So American Gangster doesn't quite work as a concept album, but it's difficult to imagine the record would be better if that concept had been fully realized and fleshed-out. On his wide-scope art-piece, Jay still can't put aside commercial success and relentless self-aggrandizement, even if those twin impulses fuck up his concept. On 'Blue Magic', he even growls, 'Can't you tell that I came from the dope game?' like it's a point of personal pride, immediately after he depicted an inevitable criminal downfall. Jay actually corrupts the impact of his own moralistic rise-and-fall story by ending the album with a pair of bonus tracks, 'Blue Magic' and 'American Gangster', that trumpet Jay's own triumph over the vast impersonal forces that landed his protagonist in prison. Throughout, Jay-Z breaks that narrative whenever he feels like it, taking care to force in all his standbys: The sneering aristocratic death-threats, the breezy uptempo party-songs, the (especially forced) for-the-ladies seduction-song. That story animates the album, but it doesn't dictate its movements. Over the course of its first 13 tracks, the album loosely outlines the criminal rise and fall we've seen in so many movies: the desperation of youth, the excited early schemes, the slow hard-fought rise, the lavish celebration of that rise, the eventual joyless inertia involved in maintaining that success, the sudden and inevitable descent into a prison-cell anonymity worse than death. Well, as a concept-album, American Gangster is kind of a wash. As a piece of media-manipulation, American Gangster is dazzling.

In working to create the impression that he'd sacrificed commerce for art, Jay recast himself as an artist rather than a CEO, a canny commercial move at a time when rappers like Kanye West are outselling CEOs like 50 Cent. By attaching himself to a big-budget crime epic, Jay guaranteed himself cross-media presence and positioned himself to regain some of the grimy credibility he'd lost with 2006's Kingdom Come, the would-be comeback that found Jay rapping about brands so expensive most of his audience had no idea what he was talking about. It makes for a good story and a great marketing coup.

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