The Ecclesiology of Shawn Carter

“Lights is blinding, girls need blinders
So they can step out of bounds quick,
The side lines is blind with casualties,
Who sip the life casually, then gradually become worse?
Don’t bite the apple Eve,
Caught up in the in crowd,
Now you're in-style,
And in the winter gets cold en vogue with your skin out,
The city of sin is a pity on a whim.
Good girls gone bad, the city's filled with them,
Mommy took a bus trip and now she got her bust out,
Everybody ride her, just like a bus route,
Hail Mary to the city you’re a Virgin,
And Jesus can’t save you, life starts when the church ends,
Came here for school, graduated to the high life,
Ball players, rap stars, addicted to the limelight,
MDMA got you feeling like a champion,
The city never sleeps better slip you an Ambien”
—Jay-z “Empire State of Mind”
Recently Mr. Shawn Carter has ruffled the feathers of the Religious Right with his chart topping song Empire State of Mind, leaving them crying at the top of their lungs “Blasphemy”. In the third verse Mr. Carter says, “And Jesus can’t save you, life starts when the church ends.” The first time that I heard this song was when Jay-z performed this song as the finale of the MTV Music Awards with Alicia Keys. I cannot lie when I first heard him say the controversial lines I said to myself “did he just say what I thought he said.” I immediately thought that Jay-z was just offering his two-cents about how the Church has let people down. But upon a second and subsequent listenings of the song my opinion about what Mr. Shawn Carter was trying to say rapidly changed.
After a more careful analysis of the lyrics it becomes obvious Jay-z is commenting on the frequent migration of young ladies from the church to the high life. The life they are chasing starts when they walk out of the church and into the world or ballers, rappers, and limelight. Mr. Shawn Carter makes the assertion that his city, New York, is full of these types of young women. The type woman who becomes seduced by the serpent and ends up taking a bite of Eve’s apple. The use of the apple line is a clever metaphor for the lure of New York City, which is called the “Big Apple”.
Back in the day when I used to go out “clubbing” I met many young ladies who were out in the club Saturday night, fornicating early morning, then would sleep for a couple hours, before heading off to church to praise God. The seduction of the high life has ensnared many young girls who end up in trapped in a life of meaningless sex, drugs, alcohol, and Hip Hop.
The line where Mr. Shawn Carter says, “Jesus can’t save you” is referring back to the line before. He is addressing the city of New York with that line. He calls New York by many names in this verse, but ultimately uses these names to address the city’s fallen state. If we look at the line “Hail Mary to the city” and understand the double intended use as religious and a reference to the miraculous last ditch effort in a football game. Religion seems like a pungent farce in light of its daughters leaving the church and hitting the club. The fruit of this city’s sin is the sidelines littered with casualties. And by all appearance Jesus didn’t save these victims of Eve’s apple.
So the question that needs to be asked is are Mr. Shawn Carter’s lyrics blasphemy or a reflection of his empirical experience of the Church? I would tend to agree with the later because sadly the Jesus has been defamed, marred, and misrepresented by the Church, leaving many disenfranchised with Jesus. But the Jesus they feel let down by is not the Jesus that died on the cross and resurrected. No the Jesus that has let them down is Scandinavian, beauty pageant winner that looks down upon the world from the walls of the church building. As a follower of the Jesus who conquered death, I feel obligated to try and reflect him to a world that has been hidden from his truth.