Jay-Z

After the breakthrough commercial success of his previous album, 1998's Hard Knock Life, Jay-Z was the biggest rapper in the world. Vol. 3 doesn’t mess with a winning formula. Timbaland collaborations "Big Pimpin'" and "Snoopy Tracks" are propulsive entries from the margins of pop-hop. The confessional "Dope Man" is a maudlin blood bath that paints Jigga as a (somewhat) reluctant street corner Don. And DJ Premier's "So Ghetto" is ghetto solidarity -- Jay-Z communing with his subjects. This ranks up there with Jay-Z's best.

Sean Carter isn't the first crime-linked hitmaker with a penchant for kicking broads out of bed at 6:15 in the morning. Frank Sinatra beat him to it. Right, Sinatra never boasted about his own callousness--not publicly, in song--and that's a big difference. Jay-Z has too many units tied up in playing the now-a-rapper-now-a-thug "reality" game with his customers, thugs and fantasists both, and only when he lets the token Amil talk back for a verse does he make room for female reality. But he goes for a rugged, expansive vigor, nailing both come-fly-with-me cosmopolitanism and the hunger for excitement that's turned gangster hangouts into musical hotbeds from Buenos Aires to Kansas City. You don't expect a song called "Big Pimpin' " to sound as if the tracks were recorded in Cairo. This one does. (Grade - A)