"Takeover" by Jay-Z is a Diss Track Fit For A King
Drumming Upstream 19
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I am learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each one as I go. Once I’ve learned how to play them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 461 songs left!
This week I learned “Takeover” by Jay-Z, a song probably most well known for the response it inspired from the rapper Nas.
Now, allow me to reintroduce Himself…
Side A
“Takeover”
By Jay-Z
The Blueprint
Released on September 11th, 2001
Liked on December 12th, 2014
Do I need to bother telling you who Jay-Z is? Unless you fell into a coma after the 1980s ended, Jay-Z is easily the most famous musician that I’ve covered in this series so far. You don’t even need to have heard a note of his music to know who he is. Your rhetorical grandmother knows about him, and your literal one probably does too. He’s the guy who married Beyoncé, the guy who helped bring the New Jersey Nets to downtown Brooklyn, the face of Tidal, and the man who cheated on Beyoncé and survived. But before he was any of those things Jay-Z (born Sean Carter) was famous for being very, very good at rapping. I don’t need to relate Jay-Z’s biography because one of the things he is particularly good at rapping about is where he came from. Son of a single mother, raised in the Marcy projects in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a drug dealer-turned-rapper who rose to superstardom in the late 90s in the wake of The Notorious B.I.G.’s untimely death. To hear him tell it, Jay-Z is the ultimate hip-hop rags to riches story, an avatar of the American Dream for a post-Reaganomics world.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the 90s and early 2000s I had a lot of opportunities to hear Jay tell it. From 1996 to 2001, the year he released the subject of today’s letter, Jay-Z put out six full length albums. That’s one a year in the era of rappers excitedly exploring the outer limits of compact disc capacity. We’re talking hour-plus every release. And that’s before we get to his guest appearances on other artist’s songs. The guy was everywhere. Those six years lined up perfectly with my attendance of grades 1 through 6 in New York public school. The hooks of Jay’s biggest hits, (“Hard Knock Life”, “Can I Get A…”, “Big Pimpin”, “Izzo”) spread like wildfire through those classrooms. Two school years and two more Jay-Z albums later, Carter’s short-lived retirement was a major topic of conversation at my 8th grade prom. Even sweatpants-wearing Slipknot fans like yours truly couldn’t avoid the guy after he released Collision Course, a mashup record with Linkin Park.1 I won't pretend that there's not some regional bias at play in this data. I bet I've also heard "Take The A Train", "Rhapsody In Blue", and "New York, New York" more than, say, the average Virginian too. But I didn't hesitate for a second before putting Carter in the same class as Ellington, Gershwin, and Sinatra. That's pretty powerful company even if we're being provincial.
No one reaches that kind of ubiquity without making a few enemies. After Jay called the toughness of the rest New York rap scene into question on “Money, Cash, Hoes”, the rapper Prodigy of the Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep started sniping back in interviews. In June 2001 at Hot 97’s Summer Jam Jay-Z debuted the first half of “Takeover”, a song from his upcoming record The Blueprint that called out Mobb Deep by name. The song peaked with Jay-Z showing emasculating pictures of Prodigy as a preteen dancer on the jumbotron, driving the crowd middle-school-cafeteria wild, before ending with a parting shot at another Queensbridge rapper, Nas.
This is where things start getting really spicy. “Takeover” wasn’t the first time Jay-Z had mentioned Nas in his music. On 1997’s “Where I’m From” Jay narrowed the field of “best rapper” down to three people: Nas, Biggie, and himself. A year earlier he’d even sampled Nas for a track on his debut album. Having by 2001 firmly out-paced Nas in album sales and name recognition, Jay-Z’s evident admiration had diminished to flippant dismissal. Nas didn’t take the mention kindly. Two months later he recorded a freestyle over the beat to the NY classic “Paid In Full” that twisted Jay'-Z’s latest single “Izzo” into a homophobic insult before rifling off threats to the rest of his label mates and collaborators. With words on wax from both sides the beef was on. Eager fans only had to wait one more month to hear Jay-Z’s response in full.
Before we really dig into “Takeover”, a word or two on The Blueprint’s release date. From 1989 to 2015 new albums were released on Tuesdays in the United States. This means that a number of albums had the extreme misfortune of appearing in stores on September 11th, 2001. One of those albums was Jay-Z’s The Blueprint. Two decades of repeating this fact has transformed it from morbid trivia into part of The Myth Of Jay-Z. I won’t go so far as to compare the squabbles surrounding “Takeover” to a national tragedy, especially since this is one of the lucky rap beefs that never spilled over into real life violence. But there was something, let’s say, poetically resonant between the warmongering tone of American politicians & pop culture in an empire under attack and Jay-Z, native New Yorker and poster boy for the modern American dream, taking five early minutes to lash out at his perceived foes on an album released literally on 9/11.
So yeah, one way of describing “Takeover” is that Jay-Z was on his “we’ll put a boot up your ass/it’s the American way” flow. Part of Jay-Z’s enduring appeal as a performer is that he raps every song with the attitude that he’s already won. This attitude works way better in rap than in global conflicts, for what it’s worth. Jay will tell you he’s still spending money he earned back in the 80s from selling drugs, that all of his rap success is just icing on top of a very thick cake. Jay-Z’s best verses are technical marvels that feel effortless, almost conversational, like he’s giving a speech at an awards ceremony after an expensive glass of champagne that he didn’t even pay for. Some people seem like they’re wearing a tux even when rocking oversized jerseys.
Backed by a martial four-on-the-floor thump (more on that on Side B) Jay-Z deploys that unflappable confidence to talk down to his cross borough opponents. Jay-Z belittles Prodigy in particular not just with short jokes (“I’ve got money stacks bigger than you”) but with the very structure of the song. For a high school dropout Jay-Z turns in a flawless five paragraph essay on “Takeover”. First a verse explaining how his Roc Nation crew shouldn’t be fucked with (tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em), then a verse each laying into Prodigy and Nas (tell ‘em) and then a short coda reiterating the futility of picking a fight with him (tell ‘em what you told ‘em). In terms of pure word count, Jay-Z makes it abundantly clear which adversary he takes seriously. The rappers not worth mentioning by name only get three words, Nas gets a whopping 329, while Prodigy earns a diminutive 152 and a few strays in the last verse. Not to say that Prodigy gets off easy. Jay-Z makes quick work of him with lines both nursery rhyme simple (“We don’t believe you, you need more people”2) and devilishly complex ("No, you're not on my level get your brakes tweaked/I sold what your whole album sold in my first week"). The pictures aren't the only reason the crowd went wild at Summer Jam.
If you know anything about “Takeover”, you know the main attraction is the Nas verse. Jay-Z attacks both Prodigy and Nas on the legitimacy of their hardcore image (a subject that as a born & raised Park Sloper I don’t feel remotely qualified to comment on) but when he turns to address Nas specifically Jay busts out some honest to god music criticism. “Had a spark when you started but now you’re just garbage” he says, speaking for every fan suffering through Nas’s diminishing returns after his classic debut Illmatic. Hov even gets faux-scientific to prove Nas’s washed-ness, fudging the numbers on Nas’s pretty good sophomore album It Was Written to conclude that he has a “one hot album every ten year average”3.
These are both compelling arguments, but any rapper could have leveled them at Nas. “Takeover” excels when Jay-Z gets specific about his relationship with Nas’s music. "Yeah I sampled your voice you were using it wrong” he says of the Nas sample on “Dead Presidents 2” before delivering a knockout punch that doubles as a mission statement: “you made it a hot line, I made it a hot song”. Whew. With this one couplet Jay-Z lays waste not just to Nas, but every rapper, wait fuck that, every musician who prizes technicality over songwriting. Take that Dream Theater! As far reaching as the implications of this line are, they’re especially incisive for Nas. For all of his technical gifts as a writer, Nas has always been a bit of a drag. The man has an eye for novelistic detail, no doubt, but he’s also a humorless bore, prone to concepts that are more impressive on paper than in execution. Not to mention his consistently terrible taste in beats, compared to Jay-Z’s impeccable track record of working with the best producers money can buy.
There’s no better illustration of Jay’s point than Nas’s response to “Takeover”. On December 18th, only two months after The Blueprint, Nas released Stillmatic. The record’s second track, in what must be an overt nod to The Blueprint’s track order as well as public eagerness for a response, is “Ether”, an all out assault on Jay-Z’s legitimacy as a rapper. At the time “Ether” registered as a shocking comeback, a vicious attack on Jay’s street cred and sexuality completely at odds with the smug formalism of Jay-Z’s first volley. Let me stop telling and start showing some live performances to prove my point; first Jay-Z’s performance of “Takeover” on MTV’s Unplugged, full of clever in-jokes and charismatic winks to the audience, and then Nas performing “Ether” in 2004, a primal scream that reminds me of the hardcore shows I went to in high school. “Takeover” is the work of someone who thinks battling is beneath him, “Ether” is the work of someone who is Super Duper Big Mad and not afraid to show it.
History has taken Nas’s side. When a rapper, or anyone for that matter, gets their soul ripped out of their body on stage we say they’ve been “ethered”, not “taken-over”. But I’ve never been compelled by “Ether” as a piece of music. Nas is objectively correct when he challenges the audience to “name a rapper [he] ain’t influenced”. To be sure, there would be no Reasonable Doubt without Illmatic. But those valid critiques are drowned out by the volume of Nas’s lower blows. Jay-Z drops one regrettable F-bomb in “Takeover”, but Nas goes back to the well of homophobia like there’s a drought. As the relative elder statesman, Nas tries to big bro Jay-Z, offering him condescending advice and psycho-analyzing his anger as a symptom of sexual frustration. It’s effective macho rap posturing, but Nas burns so many calories in anger that he’s got no juice left to make the song memorable or catchy on its own merits.
Nas is done no favors by “Ether”’s beat, a shoddy piece of y2k synth trash that wouldn’t be memorable in the slightest if one history’s greatest rappers didn’t dedicate it to attacking another all timer. “Takeover”’s best on the other hand is a work of art. The artist however….
Side B
“Takeover”
Produced by Kanye West
86-87 BPM & 91 BPM
Uuuuuuggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
For the last few weeks I’ve promised that this entry of Drumming Upstream would prioritize fun over the darker subjects that dominated recent entries. Well, this is the Not Fun part. If I need not fill you in on Jay-Z’s history, then I don’t need to tell you anything about Kanye West4, now known by Ye. Who could imagine in 2001 that this overeager producer from Chicago would one day usurp Jay-Z as the biggest name in rap? What cynic could predict that this same rapper would one day stand by Trump in the White House, declare slavery “a choice” on TMZ, and threaten to go “defcon 3 on the Jews” on Twitter? Alas that these evil days should be mine, that I am old enough to remember Kanye the hip-hop auteur and young enough to see his horrible fall from grace. The man that Ye has become disgusts and saddens me. His descent into reactionary conspiratorial thinking is as predictable as it is pitiful. Everyone can see that this man is suffering, but he’s been too insulated by his own success to be helped until it was too late. Moreover, the whole debacle has proven how little people ever cared about Ye the person to begin with. He has always been America’s useful idiot, endured by one group or another for the clout his presence provides and laughed at behind his back at every turn. Real friends? I doubt the guy has many. He’s been doomed to whatever club will have him, now down to bottom feeders skimming off the top of right-wing resentment.
As I’ve worked on this song on drums I’ve wrestled with an explanation for how we ended up here. Money is a sensible answer. No one man should have a billion dollars. The human brain can’t endure it. And yet both Ye and Jay sit near the same tax bracket and only one of them is out here comparing Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust. Call it a tale of two billionaires. Jay-Z has made an ass of himself in public, but at worst he comes across as well-intentioned but comically out of touch. He doesn’t give himself to the chance to fuck up the way Ye does. He minds his own considerable business and raises his kids. Ye on the other hand can no longer be untangled from the cycle of publication adoration and animosity. And yet I do not believe that the antisemitic, anti-intellectual, abusive divorcee of Ye 2022 sleeps inevitable in the heart of the bright-eyed rookie that produced “Takeover” for Jay-Z. I reject the Ye of the present with a full throat, but I do not pretend that the Ye of the past is the same person.
If there is any connective tissue between the two versions of Ye, it’s this: West has always had a knack for speaking to multiple audiences at once. “Takeover” is a masterpiece of a rap beat; a nasty back beat with just enough drag on its tempo and an abundance of beef in its low end. The distorted bass and guitar don’t signify rock and roll so much as rugged aggression writ large. They’re here to remind you that Jay-Z is getting his hands dirty by even addressing these insults. But to a sharp-eared rocker “Takeover” is unmistakably a riff on “Five to One” by The Doors. This hypothetical rock fan, maybe they’re a writer at a music magazine, wouldn’t just get a thrill over recognizing the source material, they’d also be tickled by the way Jay-Z updates the original’s generational revolution for his ascendance over his NY rap elders. It’s the kind of boomer-baiting that you’d expect from a car commercial, which maybe explains why The Blueprint sold enough copies to make Henry Ford blush.
For all it’s meta-textual complexity, “Takeover”’s drum part is remarkably simple. Ye has never shied away from brain dead, stadium sized drums. The kick pounds out quarter notes for five minutes straight. The snare beats the hell out of 2 and 4. The end of every phrase is punctuated by one of two simple fills. Compared to the intricate hi-hat trills of “Rewind (Sporting Life Remix)” this track was a cakewalk to learn. Where “Takeover” get challenging is its tempo. West built the drum part out of a few different sections of the original Doors track. The tempo is not exactly consistent from measure to measure, though it settles around either 86 or 87 beats per minute. The one exception is the fill that opens and closes the song, which sits at the noticeably brisker 91 BPM. This quicker intro makes the drop into the chorus feel all the heavier by comparison, earning immediately the kind of rhythmic catharsis most songs work their whole duration to build toward. Playing along with “Takeover” requires a strange rhythmic dual consciousness, an awareness both of the human imperfections inside the drum loop and the robotic perfection of the loop itself. I think mastering this balance between mechanical specificity and human inconsistency is the single biggest challenge facing modern drummers in a post-rap world. For what it’s worth, I think I did a pretty damn good job with this track.
You might notice an upgrade in visual fidelity for this cover. I finally caved to the times and bought a ring light for my camera. The results should speak for themselves, although I hope to improve my use of the tool going forward. In part inspired by the sudden brightness of the space in front of my drums, I decided to throw on shades for this shoot. Then I took my look one step further and threw on a blazer and a shirt from the New York basketball themed streetwear kings at Cookies Hoops. This look is probably more appropriate for the Jay-Z live band of the present than the look he had going in 2001, but hey, not all of us just have body length NBA gear lying around in 2022.
You might have also noticed that I had a really good time playing this song on drums. I love learning metal songs, the challenge of it and the thrill of pulling it off. But there’s nothing quite like locking in with a good rap beat. I’d encourage every drummer reading to learn how to play their favorite rap tunes on drums. It’s the fastest way to pick up on what actually makes modern audiences groove, and, speaking for myself of course, it can easily translate into your playing in any other genre. So “Takover” might be one of my favorite rap songs, but how does it stack up against the rest of the songs I’ve learned for Drumming Upstream? Find out if its arms are long enough to box with God on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
Since I’ve been generally effusive about Jay-Z in this letter I’d like to take a moment to be critical about his work on “Takeover”. I didn’t compare the reaction to the Prodigy pictures to a middle school cafeteria lightly. A lot of Jay-Z’s barbs are pretty juvenile. I glossed over it earlier, but the hard-F really bums me out. It legit took me a few takes to not get thrown off the rhythm every time that line came around. And in hindsight Jay’s accusations of fakeness feel untenable after hearing Nas so surgically lay out Jay-Z’s own trend hopping on “Ether”. So “Takeover” is by no means flawless, but is it good? You better believe it. Like all of Jay-Z’s best songs it transmutes his charismatic confidence into something you can adopt just by hitting play. It is filled with instantly memorable lines. It is simultaneously vicious and utterly unbothered. The “Bowie by way of Saliva5” format to the Nas verse is so goofy that it twists around to being great. That it resulted in no deaths and instead pushed its target to put out his best album in years makes it the best case scenario for a rap diss track. It’s going straight to the top five.
“Takeover” by Jay-Z
The next entry of Drumming Upstream will continue our pleasure seeking streak, this time with a tune from the other side of the pond. Thanks again for reading and I hope you have a great week.
At the time I thought the album sucked because I was, despite being a nü-metal fan, a “rAp iS CrAp!” rockist. Years later after untangling some internal contradictions I thought Collision Course sucked because Linkin Park’s squeky-clean dorkiness cramped Hova’s effortless cool. These days? I mean it’s weird as hell, but hearing vintage Jay verses over cybernetic nü-metal beats is kinda sick?? Definitely a go-to answer if anyone wants to understand what early 00s radio sounded like.
This line always makes me think about Gene’s outburst at Don Draper that “he’s got no people!” in Mad Men Season 2. I am legit curious about what Jay-Z thinks of Don Draper.
By his own ruthless criteria, I’d argue that Jay-Z has a “one hot album every five years average”, which all things considered is really fucking good.
No literally, that’s the “Click, Click, Boom” guy yelling “LAAAAAAAME” on “Takeover”.