Jay-Z in 8 review – the rapper’s interminable interview show should have been a podcast
Rick Rubin’s eight-part interview series with the MC is irritatingly unstructured, has portions that feel like filler and would hugely benefit from a different medium – which encourages use of the pause button
Jay-Z in 8 does what it says on the can: the docuseries, released by Mubi, finds influential, mercurial superproducer Rick Rubin interviewing rap titan Jay-Z over the course of eight meandering, freeform episodes. Directed by Rubin himself and shot in black and white, the series is ostensibly designed to give viewers a look inside the brain of a godlike musical figure as he celebrates 30 years in music.
As it makes eminently clear, this is a deeply reflective time for Jay-Z: in any given episode, he is liable to make reference to old collaborators such as Biggie and Jaz-O, reminisce on his upbringing in the Marcy Projects (the public housing units in Brooklyn where he grew up), and speak with astonishment about his rapid rise from crack dealer to generational rapper, often swinging between anecdotes with free-associative ease.
Therein lies the problem with Jay-Z in 8. It’s remarkable to see someone of his stature talk so openly about his life and career without adornment, but there is no narrative or thematic structure to this show. Aside from the moments when Jay and Rubin listen to entire songs together – which then spark more anecdotes and interview questions – it is lacking connective tissue to hold together Jay’s stories for a casual fan.
For a relative Jay-Z agnostic like myself – I like the classic records well enough but didn’t grow up with his music, and generally have a fairly superficial relationship with that era of rap music – Jay-Z in 8 borders on the interminable. Each conversation is interesting, but there’s something profoundly abrasive about being dropped into such unstructured chat. The format is clearly modelled on longform interview shows such as David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, but where Letterman is an incisive, journalistically minded interviewer with decades of experience steering conversations, Rubin is famous for his terseness. After he and Jay listen to one song, for example, Rubin simply says, “I don’t know how you did that” – a statement of fact, perhaps, but hardly a guiding idea for a casual viewer who sees the show on their Mubi homepage and decides to dive in.
At one point, Rubin offers a theory: “I don’t know that people really know how to listen to hip-hop,” he says. “It’s so dense with information, and a lot of people kind of hear the hook and the beat.” But that’s the thing about a hook and a beat: they can help draw in a listener who otherwise might not think they’re equipped to take in the rest of the information the song is providing. Jay-Z in 8 is a track without hook or beat: it is pure, dense information, and it can prove challenging at times.
Within that framework, certain little Jay-Z-isms act like anchors – “I’ve always thought like I was a businessman,” he says at one point; at another, he compares Jail, his latest collaboration with Kanye West, to a Johnny Cash song – and it’s nice enough to hear the songs themselves, which have proven durable over the course of his career.
But, ironically, the show’s most legible moments end up feeling like pure filler. Whenever Jay explains his lyrics, time seems to stop. His unpacking of the lyrics to Jail in episode six is simplistic: “No cap,” he says (of a term that has become extremely heavily used in modern hip hop), means you’re not lying; an invocation of “The Throne” refers to the collaborative album he and Kanye made. In another episode, while explaining his verse on the Notorious BIG’s I Love The Dough, he pauses to explain that “hit” means “kill.”
Most of Jay’s line-by-line lyric breakdowns, which occur a couple of times in each episode, reveal an oxymoronic quality to Jay-Z in 8: anyone watching who doesn’t know what “hit” means, or that Jay-Z and Kanye released an album called Watch The Throne, will probably be lost during most of the conversations. If you like Jay-Z enough to find the show compelling, you’ll likely be left wondering why, exactly, so much of the show’s runtime has been dedicated to this specific kind of exposition.
Jay-Z in 8 may not warrant such scrutiny. Or it wouldn’twarrant such scrutiny if it had been released in the format it so clearly wants to be: a podcast. This high-budget, artfully shot television show would work a lot better in a form that doesn’t demand its audience consume each episode in one go. Or which is so easily paused if you need to Google a reference. And, ultimately, if there’s one thing more enjoyable than watching Jay-Z and Rick Rubin listen to a Jay-Z song, it’s just listening to that song without the visual accompaniment of two guys nodding along and smiling knowingly.
As a producer, Rubin is known for his ability to cut things back, reveal the heart and true intention of a song. His first work as a director is pure excess.
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