I was disappointed that Jay-Z’s memoir, Decoded, doesn’t go into even more detail about his days in the New York crack cocaine business. As a half-Jewish philosophy graduate raised in Hampstead, I naturally consider myself a bit of an expert on the subject. I watch The Wire, of course; but I also listen to a tremendous amount of coke rap, a subgenre in which the everyday logistics of drug distribution are described with such repetitious attention to detail that it sometimes feels like taking a seat at a corporate training seminar. I’ve never smoked, sold or synthesised crack cocaine, so it’s hard to say why coke rap is so important to me, but at this point I understand the mechanics of Jay-Z’s former vocation considerably better than I understand, for instance, what my flatmate does all day in her marketing job.

And yet the truth is that my flatmate has more in common with Jay-Z than I do: in 2008, Jay-Z co-founded a marketing agency. He also has investments in streetwear, nightclubs, restaurants, hotels, beauty products and a basketball team. He isn’t quite the richest rapper alive – according to Forbes, that’s Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, who has $475 million to Jay-Z’s $450 million. But while no rational adult would read a book by Diddy – a man whose only noteworthy character trait at this point is ‘rich’ – Jay-Z’s preposterous wealth has done nothing to muffle his talent or personality. People still compare his charisma to that of Bill Clinton – with whom he now hangs out.

In the annotated lyrics that comprise about half of Decoded, Jay-Z spends far too long pedantically unpacking his own puns, so perhaps in this context I can be forgiven for observing that the annotations are not particularly good craic. To the lines ‘We don’t lease/We buy the whole car, as you should’, from his 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z adds an apologetic footnote: ‘Advising to buy a car rather than lease one speaks to my naïveté at the time. Cars lose value the minute they leave the lot.’ But the prose sections of the book, co-authored with journalist Dream Hampton, are thoughtful and revealing. You finish Decoded convinced of Jay-Z’s centrality to American culture. In 2008, the rapper DMX famously admitted that he’d never heard of Barack Obama; here, Jay-Z invokes not only Obama and Clinton, but Reagan and Bush, Warhol and Basquiat, Scorsese and Tarantino. 

One of the main themes of Decoded – and indeed of hip hop in general – is that selling albums is not that different from selling drugs. For Jay-Z and his colleagues, ‘the hustle’ and ‘the grind’ can include almost any type of economically productive activity. This doctrine may well have begun as a way for rappers to reassure their audiences (and themselves) that there is nothing inauthentic about earning millions of dollars by talking into a microphone; but it also makes it a lot easier for someone like me to identify emotionally with Ghostface Killah, Young Jeezy, Pusha T and all the rest. After all, I too have a hustle. I too have a grind. Mine just happens to involve selling literary fiction and freelance journalism.

The obvious problem with this attitude, however, is personified in the figure of Gary, the irascible homunculus in a baseball cap who sells crack on my road in Bethnal Green. From what my flatmates and I have observed, Gary seems to work at least twenty-two hours a day. And yet, despite Gary’s undeniable devotion to the hustle, I don’t seem to have adopted him yet as some sort of inspirational guru. Crack dealing, in other words, is a lot more agreeable as a metaphor than as a reality. Coke rap isn’t metaphorical though. When you sing along to ‘I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die’, you don’t have to feel guilty, because Johnny Cash never actually murdered anyone; but Jay-Z really did sell crack to addicts. In Decoded he expresses some qualified remorse. But in the lyrics of most coke rap, there’s still nothing but pride.

And that’s a problem for a rap fan. Because part of listening to rap music, really, is pretending to be pals with the rapper. Which is why you can’t approach the new lyrical compendium The Anthology of Rap edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois (Yale University Press 788pp £19.99) – in which my favourites are all well represented – in the same way that you can approach, say, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Maybe it’s all right that Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite, because a poem is mostly autonomous. With the exception, perhaps, of some of the Romantics and some of the Beats, reading a poem isn’t supposed to make you want to live your life like the poet. But rap is about fandom and role models and loyalty and belief. So if you have only the sort of disinterested and scholarly relationship with rap that is implicit in the word ‘anthology’, then you don’t appreciate rap at all – and 788 pages of annotated lyrics won’t help.

Nonetheless, both Jay-Z and the editors of The Anthology of Rap seem to view their respective books as weighty exhibits in the ongoing argument about whether rap is a valid species of poetry. In rap’s insecurity over this issue, there is a depressing hint of the American industrialist who decides his ascent will only be complete if he can get hold of an English country house and a title. Instead, rap should take some comfort in the fact that, unlike poetry, it is still a popular, profitable, endlessly surprising art form that plays an important part in the daily emotional lives of millions of people. Isn’t that more than enough?