Jay-Z, who we might call the rapper laureate of the crack era, calls the hustler he became a “monster.” Throughout his oeuvre, Jay-Z has obsessively returned to the block and to Shawn Carter’s place in the moral order there. He’s worked since Reasonable Doubt to try to sort and assign guilt appropriately. One rhyme stands out to widen the scope, revealing that Hov sees the “monster” as emerging out of a much larger monstrosity:
Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra.”
There’s a lot embedded in that brief couplet, so News Genius, the current events arm of Rap Genius, decided to apply the Genius treatment to the documents, speeches, declassified memos, and reports related to Iran-Contra. We’ve broken down the News Genius Reagan Dossier to offer readers a unique way to investigate the matter for themselves.
Did Reagan serve as the ultimate cartel leader? Did Jay-Z run the cocaine that Reagan “sponsored”? Did he “cook up the answer” to Black Power as Kanye asserts? Did Pusha T move the “cocaine Ronald gave us”? Was it as nefarious as Yasiin Bey asserts when he rhymes, “Nearly half of America’s largest cities is one-quarter black / That’s why they gave Ricky Ross all the crack”?
It’s complicated. Well, and the CIA isn’t known to come clean on things very often. Let’s start with what we do know, what is confirmed in our collected dossier. Reagan’s support for the right-wing capitalist paramilitary Contras did drive the late president to disregard national and international law with abandon. This is not a matter of any dispute. Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual asserts that Reagan was motivated by “concern for the interests of U.S. investors and fear that a democratic experiment empowering the harshly repressed peasant majority ‘might be a virus’ that would ‘spread contagion’.” To that end, Reagan directed his CIA and Pentagon to arm, equip and train a vicious counterrevolutionary force in Nicaragua.
