Jay-Z
American Gangster
(Roc-A-Fella

Shawn Carter's first postretirement album, last year's Kingdom Come, wasn't really a comeback record at all. Instead of marking a return to form, it seemed a sheepish best guess at what a hip-hop artist in his late 30s should sound like, excising the urgency and menace of Carter's younger self in the name of reserve and good taste. Kingdom Come failed, not because Jay-Z's a lesser writer or rapper than he used to be, but because what he was rapping about being a wealthy businessman just wasn't very interesting.

Inspired by an early screening of Ridley Scott's new crime picture, American Gangster finds the Brooklyn native assuming a fictional role, casting himself as a cocaine dealer who ascends and falls in the manner we've seen in countless Hollywood movies. The structure may be clichéd, but the content is not, Jay-Z's lines snapping off with a free-associative wit that recalls his first album, 1996's Reasonable Doubt.

Where Kingdom Come strained to offer a grown-up version of hip-hop, American Gangster achieves it effortlessly, imagining the form as one that places craft and cohesion ahead of marketplace concerns. There are no ready-made radio singles here, no novelty dance songs just a gifted storyteller drawing on the freedom that only fiction can allow. Seventies-era legends Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye pervade American Gangster, not just because they're sampled, but as models for a black pop star growing old with both grace and gusto.