The New York Times just ran a fascinating profile on one of the elder statesmen of hip hop. Titled, The House That Hova Built, it's a look into how Jay-Z rose to where he is today.

Aside from the traditional examination of his new career as a businessman and minority owner of the nets, this article also talks about his growth as a rapper itself.

Jay-Z, like rap itself, started out pyrotechnical. Extremely fast, stacked, dense. But time passed and his flow got slower, opened up. Why? “I didn’t have enough life experience, so what I was doing was more technical. I was trying to impress technically. To do things that other people cannot do. Like, you can’t do this” — insert beat-box and simultaneous freestyle here — “you just can’t do that.” Nope. Can’t even think of a notation to demonstrate what he just did. Jay-Z in technician mode is human voice as pure syncopation. On a track like “I Can’t Get With That,” from 1994, the manifest content of the music is never really the words themselves; it’s the rhythm they create. And if you don’t care about beats, he says, “You’ve missed the whole point.”

Pretty intriguing look. Plus, it points to some tracks from his back catalogue that I have totally overlooked.

The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, ran an article titled “How to be thrifty like a rap mogul”.  It’s actually kind of an interesting read, and focuses mostly on one artist known as Slim Thug.

“Going into the strip club to make it rain 5Gs ain’t ever profited my pockets,” he writes. Nope. This guy would rather make $5,000 trickle.

“Never spend all your money to get high or drunk…. It ain’t worth it, unless you’re trying to spend your money to flip that [excrement] and get it back plus some.”

HipHop DX is reporting some news that’s kind of surprising to me in some ways.  Method Man, one of the kings of the Wu-Tang Clan (and also short-lived star of a terrible TV-show with Redman) has starting trying to grow up.  He’s come out to say that he wants to start getting away from the image he’s so carefully cultivated.

“When you get older and you’ve got kids and your kids are going to school and you know [their] teachers…and they see how active you are and concerned [you are] with your kids’ education or well being, it’s hard to sit there and be taken seriously if people are always talking about he’s always high…which is totally not the case,” he said. “When I first came out, I was young, we were doing our thing, we smoked a lot…and we didn’t care if the world knew. Now, I have to use more discretion because of my kids. This is not for me; everything I do if for them now, so I use a bit more discretion and I don’t put weed as a forefront anymore.”

I thin Snoop said something similar a few years back.  But here’s hoping Meth can stick with this.