'The music business hate me 'cos the industry ain't make me Then there's an astonishing second verse, the like of which does not exist anywhere else in pop music, where Jay matches the truth-telling and soul-baring about his private life with something just as shocking about his public one: Instead, we get Jay using Em's beat as his confessional, returning to a theme he began to explore on the opening track, 'December 4th' (named for his birthday), of how his absent father's death, and his apparent guilt at his lack of grief, had shaped his early life. It's telling that, unlike the Blueprint track 'Renegade', the Detroit emcee chooses not to get on the mic this time: it's Jay's show, and the material is intensely personal - there is no room here for another rapper, not even to formally allow the retiring king to hand the crown to the young pretender in public. The pinnacle of his writing - an Everest at the heart of this musical Nepal - comes on 'Moment of Clarity', the second of his collaborations with Eminem. This is never less than fascinating and at times he reaches a transcendence that elevates the album into the very highest class of recordings. Even on the tracks where the theme ostensibly strays from the sense of autobiographical closure and the need to etch his name into the annals of musical history (the Neptunes-produced 'Change Clothes' the criminal's warning to rivals that makes up 'Threat') there's a determination to achieve a kind of permanence that fair knocks you backwards.ДЇor the most part, though, The Black Album is Jay at, simultaneously, his most raw and uncompromising, his most personally vivid, and - we have to assume, despite what was to happen later - his most honest and introspective. But Jay approached the writing with a concerted sense of purpose that had never gripped as tightly a hold of him before. Three other producers who'd worked with Jay before - The Neptunes, Just Blaze and an up-and-comer by the name of Kanye West - got two tracks apiece on what became a 14-track release.

This didn't quite pan out as intended, with two from the originally mooted list - Dr Dre and frequent Jay collaborator DJ Premier - conspicuous by their absence. So was the plan for the album, which was to see Jay collaborating on 12 tracks with 12 different producers. No matter where you looked for comparisons, this was pretty much unprecedented. In music, the tendency is for artists to keep on recording until they drop dead.

Look at any sport and it's hard to find an instance of a top player stepping down before they start to fade. Rap is often - and both understandably and correctly - compared to boxing, but there's never been a heavyweight champion who didn't carry on for at least one more title fight past their peak. There was nobody bigger in rap, and though the internet was starting to have an impact on the stratospheric sales levels seen through the 90s and on into the new century, there was no genre selling more steadily and widely in America, by far the world's biggest music market. Biggie and 2Pac were dead, Eminem was big but clearly still on the rise, and while Nas may have been declared the winner of the 'Ether' dis war, Jay was caning his nemesis in the charts: in their respective first weeks at the end of 2002, The Blueprint 2 sold three copies for every one of Nas's then new LP, God's Son. True, his seventh album - The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse - hadn't hit quite the same heights as its universally acclaimed predecessor, the first Blueprint, but it was still a chart-topper and had sold several million copies. Here was one of the giants of rap, a guy who'd lived the quintessential American rags-to-riches redemption story as he'd left street crime behind and had come to dominate pop culture in well under a decade. Let's think about that for a moment, because Jay's stated decision to retire from making music in 2003 was, for those who believed it, astonishing.

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