In this never-before-seen video clip, Jay-Z explains what compelled him to write his New York Times best-selling book “Decoded.”

The Hip-Hop titan says that in writing his insightful memoir, he wanted to show rap music in general is poetry. He says:

“I hope readers take away from this book that rap is…it’s poetry. It’s thought-provoking and there’s thought behind it and there’s great writing in rap as well. You never hear rapper being compared for like the greatest writers of all time. You hear Bob Dylan, but so is Biggie Smalls. In a Hitchcock way some of the things that Biggie wrote — Rakim! I mean listen to some of the things he wrote. If you take those lyrics and you pull them away from the music and you put them up on the wall somewhere and someone had to look at them, they would say, ‘This is genius. This is genius work.’”

Check out the video below:

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